Stormsail

Well finally it’s available for your listening pleasure or displeasure which ever takes your pick. Kev has done some sterling work and mixed the recording of the last band practice of the unknown covers band. You can get hold of the mp3 from here.

Well I can’t believe it’s come round to Ed’s stag do already but just proves the point that time flies! The Friday evening began in Dorking at the Kings Arms pub for a few warm up beers and some food before moving onto The Star where we then stayed until closing time. Perhaps I shouldn’t of had the Cuban cigar that evening as I felt it the next day but as always they seem to go down well at the time. We all managed to crawl our way back to the travel lodge to get some sleep although it took Ed and I some time to get to sleep as we were babbling for a while.

The next day everyone was a bit jaded from the night before so we had to have a hearty breakfast at the Little Chef (or suitably renamed the Little Thief) before making our way over to Redhill to Priory Events where the fun was to start. Ed had been suitably wound up for this during the evening before as he had no idea on what was happening! Any the mornings activity was 4×4 fun in Land Rover and after some excellent instruction from Lawerence we all managed to have a go driving the Disco over hills ditches, banks, lakes, pot holes etc. I guess one of the most memorable moments was the B Team getting stuck quite early on into the day and the A team having to come and rescue them. What was even funnier was Ed managing to make it over the terrain they got stuck in……son of a bitch indeed! Nice one centurion!

However, Kevin was the only one who managed to get us out of some close shaves getting stuck ourselves as that would have been embarrassing getting the B Team to come and rescue us but he did manage to also rip off both bummers in some excellent escape techniques…nice one Kev.

Following from the excellent 4 x 4 adventures we then had lunch followed by part two of the days activities……

The Campfire Challenge

You are on a trek in the Highlands and your team has become separated from the group and is lost in the middle of unfamiliar terrain. As it gets dark you realize that food and a fire are essential if you are to survive the night. Armed with a “wrist rocket” each member of the team must hit the artificial targets in order to earn matches.

Once your team feels you have earned enough matches to start a fire, you will be challenged to find and filter water and get a fire going. The pressure is on, because it is the first team to boil half a litre of filtered water that wins the challenge.

So after some interesting target practice later we were lead into the forest in our two teams to start the fire……..and the race…….

…..sometime later and some interesting inter team banter, the B Team managed to boil their water first and hence win the competition……gits…..

The final part of the day involved Ed and I in the battle of the space hoppers…..and man that really hurt!

I’m glad to say that I won that battle but at a costly price……mainly I didn’t entirely feel ok for several hours…..perhaps it was last night catching up……man I’m getting on! After that outrageous day we all headed back to the travel lodge for a rest and to get ready to go out back into Dorking. Once the rest of the Stags arrived at The MaltHouse pub we made Ed wear some silly clothes and Gus announced it to the pub…..

However Ed didn’t stay that way for long…..shame. Our next pit stop was the Pizza Express for dinner and then onto the Surrey Yeoman for more drinks and examine the local bird wildlife! Following the pub interesting things happened with a really giant bird….. ;P

Mmmm, funny that they automatically assume that it’s hens…..doh

The next day after everyone managed to surface it was breakfast again at the little thief and then onto a nice 2 hour walk in the area before having a much needed Sunday lunch at another pub. All in all a fantastic weekend for Ed and the rest of the stags……

All the pictures from the event can be found here.

In the loft at home I’ve a SunFire V100 which acts as my home server and performs a number of tasks. Having just recently successfully upgraded to Solaris 10 11/06 via live upgrade I thought it time to have a re-org.

root@bean~$more /etc/release
Solaris 10 11/06 s10s_u3wos_10 SPARC
Copyright 2006 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 14 November 2006

Now, building applications off the net takes up a lot of time and to be frank I can’t be arsed anymore doing it. If it’s already in pkg format then I’d rather just install it and at least if it’s maintained correctly then I can upgrade without the hassle of rebuilding again. Thankfully other bods on the net have already thought of this and that’s where the nice people at blastwave come in. Following the howto there we’re able to install pkg-get and allow us the ability to install the packages I’m after and all their dependencies. This will allow me to remove the installations I’ve got in /usr/local and move to the pre-installed/pre-built ones that get installed in /opt/csw. Obviously once there installated I’ll need to configure the individual packages. So I’m going to do a series of posts detailing my migration over as a) it’ll allow me to remember if I have to do it again and b) someone else out there on the ether might be interested to know.

Bean was original build and installed using JET (Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit) technology developed by the Sun Professional Services chaps at Sun to save time when building multiple systems using a template. This has grown over the years and now allows you to build complex configurations via boot net – install. I used it to install the base OS, mirror, patch using EIS standards.

Getting started

Ok first thing is to install pkg-get and install using the instructions from blastwave which I’ll shortcut here:

* modify /opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf and add UK mirror

# UK
url=http://www.mirror.ac.uk/mirror/blastwave.org/unstable

# Solaris 10: If you wish to limit pkg-get to installing packages
# ONLY to the global zone, then uncomment this line
PKGADDFLAGS=-G

* allow hands off installations

cp /var/pkg-get/admin-fullauto admin

* enable gnupg

/opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i gnupg textutils
wget –output-document=pgp.key http://www.blastwave.org/mirrors.html
gpg –import pgp.key
pkg-get -U

add /opt/csw/bin to .profile

I then should be able to add all the services I require from the list of available software……more soon.

Well, had another band practice this week with myself on the old bongo machine and was just a small fraction easier than the week before. Still I’m not expecting to turn into a proper drumming for several years but can at least bash something out. For those of you with the proper stomach constitution, you can find the very rough and I mean very rough band idea session mp’s from here.