billy's blog

Author: billy

  • Shutdown -h

    I am shutting down the blog section. Eventually will move the content to the main site.

    Close all post for commenting to avoid spam. Will keep the post for references

  • Whiterussian RC5 Released

    Our friends at openwrt released the Whiterussian RC5
    http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=4977

    A lot of bugfixes….. Time to do a backup of my WRT54GS and upgrade

  • Upgrading to FC5

    Time to upgrade to FC5…

    First we upgrade our system to the latest FC4 updates:
    yum upgrade

    Upgrade the fedora release:
    rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm

    Upgrade the yum:
    yum upgrade yum

    And now time for the full system upgrade:
    yum upgrade

    Wait……….do a reboot and you are up and running.

  • Fedora Core 5 Released

    Fedora core 5 released today.

    bofh waits for it upgrade, i will give it a couple of days for the mirrors to sync and then i will upgrade through yum

  • appending the bash history

    One common problem with the default settings of bash or the defaults settings of your bash_profile ~/.bashrc is the bash_history.

    When you logout from your shell all the commands you entered there are writteen to the bash_history. Hmmm what happens when you logout from 2 or more shells ? Yes the last history list is written = you loose what you typed in the others shells you closed.

    Instead of overwriting the history list to the history file you can append it.

    shopt -s histappend
    export HISTSIZE=4096

    We also change the default HISTSIZE from 500 lines to 4096

    Add the commands you your ~/.bashrc ~/.bash_profile and you are up and running

  • Cleaning the dosage head

    It is really important to have the write person for the job…

    1)Give him a call.

    2) Explain him that you need to clean your jet.

    3) Follow his instructions.

    Done. The flow from the 50% Jet is back to normal.

  • Intermediate pressure test

    What do you do when you want to check your first stage ?

    Option 1: Send it to GKAM

    Option 2:

    Step 1: Get the IP test guage from GKAM πŸ™‚
    Step 2: Attach it to the low-pressure BC hose

    The IP pressure from the first stage of Ray is 10.5 bar. And has a fast response when you breath from the octupus. Looks ok to me….

  • Tank Hydrostatic test

    My 4lt tank just came back from the hydrostatic test.
    One step closer to dive the unit πŸ™‚

  • Draeger Ray photos

    Some photos of my Ray…

    Hoses and Mouthpiece

    Ray Hoses

    Scrubber canister

    Scrubber canister
    Bottom part of the canister. You can see the P-port waiting for the OxygaugeCanister bottom

    Dosage head for EAN 50
    Dosage Head 50%

    oxygauge

    Oxygauge First stage regulator, manifold, octapus and cauge

    Draeger Ray regulator

    The compete device

    Draeger Ray

  • Draeger Ray Tests…

    I spend my whole day at work reading the manual. Normally i don’t read the manuals. This time i did it and i really enjoy it.

    The Draeger Ray manual is more than complete. They explain everything from the complete assembly and dissasembly of the unit to pre and post dive maintainance and all the risks (and believe me there are a lot).

    With the help of the manual i did an initial assembly. Just the tank the first stage regulator and the dosage unit.

    First test shows me a flow of 5lt/min. According with the manual i should get 8.25 lt/min +/- 20% this value is out of the range.

    Since the tank has about 50bar i thought that this is our problem. Wrong, the dosage unit has dirt and needs to be cleaned πŸ™

  • Draeger Ray

    Yesterday i got a very interesting phone call from my friend GKAM, a known rebreather diver in the greek underwater community.

    Here is the conversation:

    GKAM: Bill i found a Draeger ray are you still interested ?
    Me: Sure, when can i buy it ?
    GKAM: Tomorrow i think
    Me: Ok sounds nice

    Honest i couldn’t sleep that night. When this guy propose you something you allready know 2 thinks:

    a) That it is a bargain
    b) That is works

    I was searching for a rebreather for more than a year. My search on ebay didn’t went as i expected. A lot of Dreager Dolphins but most of the time they ended with a buyer and they appear again a couple of days later with the same decription and photos. I bid twice on them just to get a nice email message from the buyer to finish the auction outside the ebay. Since the price was on average 1700 Euros i didn’t risk it.

    Date 26 February Time late in the noon
    I went to see the rebreather with the money in my pocket πŸ™‚

    The reb is ready to dive, condition as new.

    It came with 2 dosage heads one 32% and one 50%, the first one still sealed, an oxygauge with a sensor, and 5 lt of DiveSorb.
    Yes i bought it.

    Finally i am a happy owner of a Draeger Ray Rebreather.

    This is how our story starts….. and believe me we have a lot of work to do in order to dive it plus now we have one more reason to finish our ppo2 display…

    Photos coming soon

  • Google talk on your gmail account

    They did it again πŸ™‚

    Finally one IM program less for talking with your friends. Now you don’t need to install google talk in order to talk with your friends. Do it from your google mail page.

  • WordPress 2.0 and a Happy New Year

    First of all Happy new Year πŸ™‚

    This year started with the release of WordPress 2.0. WordPress is going better and better. The 2.0 version is slick and you get a WYSIWYG editor among the changes.

    To be honest for some reason i got the latest.tar.gz containing WordPress 2.0 on Dec 27. The timestamp for my wp-config.php and .htaccess just after the upgrade is Dec 27 11:02. The upgrade from 1.5 took no more than 10 minutes withoutΓƒΖ’Γ’β‚¬Ε‘Γƒβ€šΓ‚Β  any problems.

    So in short happy bloging with WordPress 2.0

  • Playing with LVM

    My main problem all the time is that i have small capacities on hard disks (8GB,10GB) and so on.

    I don’t want to throw them away but i don’t want also to leave them lying around.

    This time i did an exception: i bought a big one, a Western Digital WDC WD2000JB (200GB) plus this time i didn’t the same mistake => That is create partitions with knowning how big it should be and how you will resize them on the feature.

    So i desided to give a try to LVM. LVM isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Follow the howto and you will be up and running in seconds.
    Initialize the disk

    [root@bofh ~]# pvcreate /dev/hdc
    Physical volume “/dev/hdc” successfully created

    Create a volume group
    [root@bofh ~]# vgcreate volume_group /dev/hdc
    Volume group “volume_group” successfully created

    [root@bofh ~]# pvdisplay /dev/hdc
    — Physical volume —
    PV Name /dev/hdc
    VG Name volume_group
    PV Size 186.31 GB / not usable 0
    Allocatable yes
    PE Size (KByte) 4096
    Total PE 47695
    Free PE 47695
    Allocated PE 0
    PV UUID xWttvY-ruQD-AaiC-ibkp-SPk1-v5nZ-GMLXVY

    Creating a logical volume
    [root@bofh /]# lvcreate –size 10GB volume_group -n backups
    Logical volume “backups” created

    Create a filesystem on the /dev/mapper/volume_group-backups mount it and you have finished

    When i will need more space for my backups i will do a lvextend extend the filesystem and that’s it.

    Plus i can attach other harddisks on the lvm anytime i want πŸ™‚

  • Converting ext3 to reiserfs

    I am a fun of reiserfs. Period.

    The only filesystem i had without reiserfs was on my laptop. 20GB of data on ext3.

    I wanted to converted to reiserfs without doing a tar create a new filesystem on the disk and untar the data. Since i had a working backup set, i give a try on convertfs (http://tzukanov.narod.ru/convertfs/)

    Boot from a CD with builtin kernel support for the filesystems you want to convert from and to.

    Build the convertfs utilities on another machine and start the conversion.

    Warning: It takes a lot of time. On my laptop (Pentium M 1.3 GHz) took about 2 hours to do the conversion.

    Change your fstab and boot in a your new filesystem.

    Everythink worked as expected.

    Case closed.

  • Asterisk 1.2 Released

    The release of asterisk 1.2 came sooner than i expected (https://blog.billy.gr/archives/2005/11/12/asterisk-releases-i-cannot-follow-anymore). At the time i write this an 1.2 asterisk is being built on my machine.

    From the asterisk web site “This release of Asterisk contains over 3,000 improvements on version 1.0, including hundreds of new features and applications.”

    When we will find time to test them ?

  • Debian Installer etch beta 1 released

    Debian team released the new installer for the etch.

    It appers that the next time (in about 1-2 years πŸ™‚ that you will install Debian you will have a graphical version of the installer.

    For the rest of us, an apt-get dist-upgrade will be sufficient πŸ™‚

    Also they dropped support for installations using 2.6 kernel for the sparc32 architecture…..

    Time to buy a sparc64 ?

  • Asterisk Releases… I cannot follow anymore

    I don’t know what is going on on Digium but i must admit i cannot follow their releases anymore

    Have a look on the announcements

    Asterisk 1.2.0-beta1 29 Aug 2005
    Asterisk 1.2.0-beta2 1 Nov 2005
    Asterisk 1.2.0-rc1 9 Nov 2005
    Asterisk 1.2.0-rc2 12 Nov 2005

    It appears that we will have a stable 1.2.0 till the end of the month.

    I will do some tests in my production voip with the 1.2.0-rc2. The machine still runs on 1.2.0-beta1 and i want to upgrade it but i have no spare time…

  • FreeBSD 6.0 Released

    4 days has passed since the new FreeBSD logo and now a fresh FreeBSD is waiting to grab it from the mirrors.

    I wish i will find some time to test it. Even on a virtual machine…

  • New FreeBSD logo

    The competition is over.

    Finally after about 8 months from the announcement we have a new Logo.

    And believe me it is really nice (http://logo-contest.freebsd.org/result/640-1.png).
    Even if it isn’t the daemon, we will get used to it