Radke Land

Almost a year ago, I volunteered to help set up a couple of IPCop boxes for the purpose of basic firewalling, VPN, and QOS between two sites. I am always leery of building Linux based systems to do the work of embedded devices, since computers (unless you spend extra for them) tend to be less reliable in my experience. One also considers power and moving parts. The end goal was to be able to take any computer with two ethernet ports, and capable of booting from a USB "thumb drive", and turn it into an instant firewall.

Due to a lot of issues that seem to crunch down on a psycho "keep up with the newest" mentality, I found myself compelled to upgrade to the newer version 6.2 of Drupal. This blog is bound to be quite unrefined, as it will consist almost entirely of copy/paste notes from my own best effort to make tracks. If you have specific questions, pleas e feel free to email me (if you can't figger out how to, there's little hope for you as a hacker). This 'guide' is very opaque, and assumes an intermediate Drupal site administration level.

Wow ... in the spirit of blog entries I feel the need to ... express a bit before getting to the meat. All of "this" started when I decided I should have a nifty GUI HTML editor to make it easier on users. Then ... oh! Yeah ... Drupal 6 (next blog, right after this ... if only rough notes ... I promise) and ... Image Module issues ... and then taking another look at my sitemap from previous efforts ... well ... it all devolved into chaos.

After the site upgrade to Drupal 6.2, I discovered that sometime in April, the format of the names of my Apache access logs had been changed. They used to look like this:

Ok, just way too much happened in the last little bit to actually make a full coherent post. Here's the short list.

1. Upgraded Drupal to 6.2
2. Upgraded all of the related modules
3. Oh my goodness ... stuff stuff stuff

Ok, this one is boring, with lots of repeats (sorry). Not only were the threads changed with a perl update (see thread-boss-worker-updated), but the changes were enough to screw up one of my 'threads->create' calls. Oh well, it's been done, and here's what's left:

It is a fundamental law of ... blogging that updates come in spurts? I hacked (just a little teensy weensy tiny bit) and we're back in business with the 5.8 threading. Apparently, the distinction between joinable and still waiting has been removed with the recent threads upgrades. I don't have enough free brain cells to grok this, but the punch line is ... well, look at the finished version of 'threadbossworker.pl' for yourself, and compare it to http://www.radkeland.org/boss-worker-threaded-model-implemented-perl if you're masochistic, and ... grin, and hope it works for you.

Ok, to start with, it's been forever since I've blogged.

Hi guys. Happy New Year and I finally got around to getting on.
Been really hot here and have relatives from NSW which is fun.
Have big family wedding so relatives coming in to town.
Loved the photos and keep them posting.

love Pauline

At about 3:30 AM, Saturday August 11th, a very violent wind/lightning storm passed through our neighborhood, and knocked out power (to Radkeland as well, just in case you were wondering). Power was (finally!) restored at about 5:30 PM on Sunday, August 12th.