It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted an update on whats going on. Lots has changed since my last post too! This site (and the others hosted here) have been moved to a new server kindly donated by Andrew Van Slageren - which means the old dual P3 1Ghz with 1Gb of RAM has been replaced with a 1RU Dual Opteron 2.4Ghz with 7Gb of RAM. I had a few issues with the server running out of RAM(!), however a bit of tweaking over the past few days seems to have brought that under control.

In the phone world, I’ve moved on to a HTC Touch Pro 2. This is a fantastic phone. I did have an issue with the USB connector on the phone and had to send it in for a warranty claim, however it seems to be much better now. There are still a few minor issues with keyboard LED brightness on one key - I can live with that though. The stock ROM from HTC is pretty damn good - certainly a big step from back in the Hermes days where the stock ROMs were full of crud. I’m even liking WM6.5 - which was something I found VERY hard to do on the old Hermes - probably due to the lack of CPU/RAM on the older models.

I’ve started doing from night VFR for my flight training - however as the beginning of winter is rolling in it is making it difficult to get suitable days. Due to the height of the Melbourne CBD the cloud base needs to be 3100ft or heigher - which is rare right now.

I’ve also rejigged all my home systems to run on Xen in CentOS 5.5. I upgraded my old fileserver to an Intel Core i5 CPU which supports hardware virtualisation and now have many linux VMs and one Windows XP VM. Much more useful than running a single instance on a physical machine! I now have 1 PC for Asterisk (as it doesn’t run in a VM well!), 1 PC for my VMs, 1 x Via CN1000 as my router (using a CF card as a HDD), my Mac Pro as my desktop, a Dell Inspiron 8600 as my girlfriends main system, and a new ASUS EEEPC 1005P as my netbook. I think this is the favourite setup I have ever had for computing!

I’ve been playing with Xen for quite a while - having everything virtual is a godsend - however when you hit performance problems it can be a nightmare. After recently following some guides on Xen DomU installation I noticed that performance in the Disk IO area was just horrible - so I did what anyone in my shoes would do and wrote a quick guide that will squeeze MUCH more performance out of your Xen installations than following many of the existing (and outdated) guides.

This method works so well because it keeps all blocks aligned on your RAID5 array. If you do things differently, then you will get multiple writes as parity is updated on your array causing a huge penalty to performance.

Head over to the Xen Performance Guide

It’s taken a while - but I’ve finally managed to find a day clear enough to do a PPL flight test. As of noon today I have completed the required activities to hold a private license. Next stop, CPL :)

I’ve been waiting for quite a while now to do my Private Pilots License flight test - and its just amazing what the weather can do. I’ve been forced to reschedule my flight test countless times as whenever I do book it the weather turns out to be unsuitable!

My latest attempt resulted in a severe turbulence warning across the entire area of my flight. It seems the best way to guarantee awful weather for a day is to get me to book my flight test on it! My next attempt is scheduled for Thursday 25th. Lets see how we go this time… ;)

Well, I’ve completely given up on the commercial Digium Fax for Asterisk module. After completely rebuilding my config to test the module I encountered tons of issues. Faxes were failing 99% of the time. I rebuilt the free app_fax with spandsp and straight away things were back to 100% success rates for both sending and receiving.

Sorry Digium but you just can’t compete on this front.

The tech support offered to me after my last post was polite, but you can tell that they are not intimately familiar with every portion of Asterisk and seem to overlook details from previous communications. It was a nice notion by Digium but notions don’t make products work!