The Gears Inside My Head

I've been running DD-WRT on my LinkSys WRT54G routers for years.  It's always served me well.  I recently found out that if you want to make the new Windows 7 homegroups work you MUST have IPv6 connectivity on your LAN.  That does not work out of the box with DD-WRT.  It doesn't help that there hasn't been a new build of DD-WRT for a few years.  DD-WRT has IPv6 options but they are clunky and require additional scripting to work properly. So, I started looking for alternatives.  I had heard of Tomato firmware before but never tried it.  Seems the " Shibby " version has most of the features I wanted so I grabbed a copy.  I must say I am truly impressed.  This firmware has so many sweet features it almost blew me away.  Go to the site and check the list.  The really nice thing is that IPv6 support just works out of the box. The one issue I had was in flashing to the new firmware.  I would up bricking my WRT54GS v3.  N...

and sometimes you get in ones way... Just last week I was happily working on servers, decommissioning old equipment, writing scripts, and doing those things that a system admin does.  Then, wham, I get laid off.  The company is being reorganized and has to eliminate  1/3 of the staff.  A bit cliche I must say, to be laid off just before Christmas, but it is what it is.  So, here I am sending out resumes.  Oh well, life goes on.

I just ran into an issue where I had an older Ubuntu box running 8.10 which is not an LTS release and wanted to upgrade it.  Since it's no longer supported even doing simple updates wasn't working.  After searching the web a while I found a number of answers that combined allowed me to upgrade. I found I was getting these errors when doing the " do-release-upgrade"   Checking for a new ubuntu release    Failed Upgrade tool signature    Failed Upgrade tool     Done downloading extracting 'jaunty.tar.gz'    Failed to extract Extracting the upgrade failed. There may be a problem with the network or with the server. The following information is from numerous sources.  It worked for me, I cannot guarantee it will work for you.  Try not to do the upgrade over SSH as problems can occur. Note: Ubuntu has an upgrade guide that goes over upgrading older versions here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EOLUpgrades?a...

This is a very late entry into the blogosphere.  I've never had much in the way of time to devote to this sort of thing so I've never tried it.  I figure it's time to put down my thoughts and any pertinent references I need quick access to.  Perhaps it might help a few others out along the way.  We'll see how it goes. In case you're wondering about the name of the blog, I consider myself a "gearhead".  It's more of an insider term that summarizes "geek", "nerd", "techie", etc. all in one.  I've never liked the term "geek".  That's a carnival performer who eats bugs.  Similarly I've never liked "nerd"  since it has a very specific connotation associated with it. "Gearhead" has always seemed more appropriate so the title seemed appropriate.