Asparagus!

Asparagus.

Even if the season is very short, English asparagus is always top quality and in my view is well worth the wait. It has an unbeatable freshness and flavour. Not like the stuff our supermarkets fly half way round the world.

I always try and get mine from a Farm shop / Farmers Market or a local market such as Chesterfield, Doncaster or Sheffield.

 I have to say that I like my asparagus lightly cooked and served with melted butter or a fresh poached egg, yum! – And if it does all get eaten I will often make an Asparagus risotto.

I just love the simple qualities of fresh seasonal food.

Amateur Radio

There are a few people I know that knock Amateur Radio and I not sure why, of course there is the view of the hobby as shown in the Simpsons but who takes that seriously?

I consider myself fortunate to have had contact with People all over the world on my radio. I found that they all are helpful and very friendly.

The BBC’s Motto is “Nation shall speak peace unto nation”

It’s really what I have found happens in Amateur Radio (or Ham Radio if you like).

51 QSOs on PSK31 in the last week.

All this was carried out, by getting my half size G5RV in place, not quite where I wanted it, but its working okay.

Station Details

Radio FT897
Interface ZLP
Aerial G5RV

Software HRD


QSL cards via www.eqsl.cc or via bureau.

Remote Sysloging for Wireless Access Points

Having an number of issues with some wireless access points. I decided that it would be  a good idea to enable the remote syslog utility on them.
 
The next question was to which server would they send there syslog details to, well for me it had to be one of the linux servers we have on site, so I chose out ubuntu utility server running Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS.
 
First I made sure that the server was up to date
1. I know I shouldn't by I sudo su -
Then
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade
4. Back up the server
5. The server was running the ubuntu default of rsyslog daemon, I could have chosen syslog-ng - but I am more comfortable with sysklogd.
 
# apt-get install syslogd
so then I made a copy of the syslog.conf file
cp /etc/syslog.conf /etc/syslog.conf.b4change
and added the line
# Access Point Logging
local7.debug     /var/log/wap.log
The sends all the messages from facility local7, having the priority of debug or greater
to the above file.
 
I started with the facility local7 as I often found it to be the default on some comms kit.
Later I planned to add;
*.*;local7.none;
auth,authpriv.none        -/var/log/syslog
 
to filter out the WAP entries from the syslog.
now to create the log file
touch /var/log/wap.log
 
Now to make syslog listen to messages from remote machines:
edit /etc/default/syslogd to include the -r option:
SYSLOGD=”-r”
and restart the syslog daemon.
# service sysklogd restart

Needed to open the port on the fire wall and as I using ufw it was;
# ufw allow from 192.168.3.107 to any port 514

Now on the Wireless Access point - as we were using a Netgear WG102 - it was just a couple
of settings to enable in the  menu.

Now testing, nothing was being added to the log from local7 - however log entries were being placed in the syslog and user.log

Using logger I tested as follows
logger -p local7.debug "is this working?"
 
That worked as it should
 
So I checked the WAPs docs but nothing about the facility it uses.
so on the server using tcpdump
# tcpdump -s 0 -v -X port 514
 
I checked and found it was using both User and Auth.
After a bit of round and round the mulberry bush - I got to speak to netgear support and found that the facility could not be changed.
 
So I writing a shell script to sort the filtering out !

Pneumonia

Well haven't been up to much lately managed to get Pneumonia before Christmas and had a lot of time off work and only managed to start back last week.

Did pick a good day to go back either as Ofsted were in School, still from the IT point of view it hasn't yet caused us to many problems.

Unlike some staff members who expect you to drop everything and find space on a server,  load their new application and then will not give you the staff laptops to update. All this must be done for Wednesday Morning !

Tempted to quote" Prior planning prevent P*ss poor performance" but I better not !