Recovery (Not Data Recovery)

Monday we were hit by a car (more a truck) and I have spent the last few days getting over the ‘injuries’. Mostly just a sore neck now, but I had sore knees at the time.

Our Car:

The car that his us:

And because we were hit so hard, the car we ran into:

Not the way I had envisaged ending a game of minigolf, but what am I to do. The rest of the family is ok: mum is a bit shaken and coming to a stop a lights will not be an easy thing to do for a while.

I guess I better describe a little of what happened. We were driving down Cantebury road, 5 minutes from home, when we slowed to a stop a fair distance from the lights. There was either an accident up ahead or a truck doing a slow U turn that had cause the traffic to build up. Once we came to a stop, we heard a load screeching coming from behind us. The next thing I know we were slammed forward. I don’t know how long it was before we crashed into the car in front but dad pulled hard left to get out of the traffic. We hit the car in front of us about half a meter from the driver side of the car: we almost missed it. The guy driver the F100 that hit us was an elderly gentleman, that I guess was not quite paying attention and didn’t slow down.

I was hoping to look at setting up my server for CVS that evening and formatting my computer yesterday or today. What I have managed to do is just sit relax and do some stretching. I still need to format my laptop so that it is nice and fresh for when I go back to work on Monday :(

-= Comments
1. Andrew B Coathup | January 11th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Glad you are all ok. Though you should keep an eye on the whiplash.

You must have been hit pretty hard as F100’s don’t tend to dent easy.

What is the etiquette on displaying someone’s car registration on the internet? I am juggling it in my mind. Still undecided. There isn’t a publicly accessible database that I know of for looking up owners details based on registration.

2. pimaster | January 12th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I thought about it at the time and I wasn’t very concerned. I have now fixed it up.

3. Matthew Delves | January 12th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Good to hear you are okay. I would suggest doing a Murcotts ( http://www.murcott.com.au/ ) defensive driving course which is always good. Though would be more applicable to the elderly gentlemen rather than you (or any member of your family). Hope you recovery is swift and you get back on the road quickly.

4. Clinton | January 15th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Yikes - that’s some major energy. Nobody wins when cars start acting like dodge-em’ cars… :( It’s good to hear you and your family are okay - may you never have to blog on this topic again!

5. Joshua Hayes | January 24th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Being in a car accident is never nice. I remember when my brother got T-boned by a Grey 4-wheel drive at about 90km/h that ran a red light. It wasn’t pretty. The passenger side of the car was pressed into about where your hand break is. The windows imploded, and the windscreen was cracked just about cracked in half. Luckily enough he only came out of it a bit shaken up and a few scratches and bruises.

I’m glad nobody in your family was injured. Oh yeah and Matt I agree, the old man should go for some driving courses :)

Slow move to linux - Resolving computer names with wins

For a while know I have wanted to make a greater move to linux. My fear has been being stuck without a usable computer (either the replacement would be too slow or the machine would not be in a stable state). Running my laptop on Fedora Core 5 for the past ~9 months has been rather good for testing the waters. I need to reformat the laptop because of issues within the package management ( I tried to get wireless working before it was introduced into the repository, so had to compile from source, also tried to compile alsa from source, not sure why any more ). Fedora Core 6 is also out so I thought I would try to start with a clean slate.

One thing that troubles me is updates are all of the net. If I want more than one computer to be on the same distro and I want to play around with the distro more often, then I need a closer copy of those repositries.

Step 1. Setup Box with those repositries.
I setup a box a while ago ( can’t believe I didn’t blog it ) as a potential server. I’ve setup apache and copied the installers off of the cd into a directory.
The box will update itself from its own server.

Step 2. Connect to the box from another machine.
I have had various problems with this. It is always easy to ping the ip address, but I don’t won’t to be that simple. Enabling samba and wins support in linux is easy enough.
To get samba running you just need to set it as a startup service. There is a services menu item in fedora.
To get wins support in samba, I had to edit /etc/samba/smb.conf ; find ( or add ) wins support = yes

That’s fine. I can do a nmblookup to find the computer name, but why can’t I ping it. I turned on a Windows box and it can ping it, obviously the machine doesn’t know that it can use wins to resolve names.
/etc/hosts is a file to hardcode computer names to ip addresses.
/etc/resolv.conf is a file to specify nameservers
/etc/host.conf I though would hold the answer. Mine has a line “order hosts, bind”. I found out that hosts refers to the hosts file, and bind refers to a DNS lookup. I thought that if I added in there wins I would be set. But it is an invalid entry.

There is another file which took my a while to find (samba doc): /etc/nsswitch.conf. In it is the line “hosts: files dns”
Adding wins in there saved the day (had to restart network services before it was affected of course). I know have the ability (knowledge) to ping the box by machine name. Hazzar. It only took me 2-3 days. Next I think will be CVS. I have set it up before, but need to setup it up on a real machine. Then it will be getting a good sync process happening for the packages (core updates and extras)

-= Comments
1. Jonathan | January 8th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Oh, cool. I’ve been looking to setup a machine with fedora (that is what you have on the server) and I’ve got one with RedHat (Think it’s called RH EL 4.3)
Remember to tell us how you set it up for CVS!

2. Wireless Networking | July 13th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Good article, keep em coming