After following the article published earlier, you ended up with two OpenVMS 7.3 systems running on SIMH VAX emulator instances. Networking was configured, both over DECnet and TCP/IP. Next up: clustering those two systems.

Last week, I decided to pick up a pet project I started once but never got around to finish succesfully; building my own OpenVMS cluster. OpenVMS is one of the oldest operating systems that is still actively developed; it was originally created as VMS by Digital Equipment Corp (DEC, in short), which was bought by Compaq, which was bought by Hewlett-Packard. While most people know Linux and its UNIX roots, this system is a totally different cup of tea.

Three different architectures of machines can run VMS: the oldest being VAX, which was replaced by Alpha, which was in turn replaced by Itanium (the HP Integrity line of machines). Getting that kind of hardware for home use is not impossible, but would be both costly to purchase and hurting your power bill - and they're not exactly quiet either. Emulation is the way to go. Hence, a new goal: getting an emulated VMS cluster up and running. In this article we'll create two VMS machines and prepare them for clustering.

Over the years, there have been a good number of decent RISC workstations: DEC, IBM, SGI, Sun and HP all had their time. Nowadays there's hardly any left - pretty much all of the large UNIX manufacturers' workstations have been discontinued. I still have mine though, and I like them too much to let go already.

A while back I did an article on a catch-all solution for streaming content to the Playstation 3 using MediaTomb and a big transcoding script. It served me well: every movie I had - be it avi, mkv, mp4, dvd iso, RealMedia, ... was properly handled. I didn't care for HD content, mainly because my TV was a plain old CRT tube and couldn't tell the difference between a 720x480 mpeg2 and a 1080p h.264 movie anyway.

Last month I did get me a HDTV finally, and my original transcoding script wasn't ready for it.

I'm not a developer, but I like Trac. I like its wiki syntax, and the way you can create a simple, effective ticketing system without a billion options you'll never use anyway. I like how you can disable whole chunks of the system - like the code repository subsystem, which I don't have a use for. It's easy to modify (it's python, after all) and has a billion plugins available.

What we were looking for was a system that does wiki, ticketing, has a way to set ACLs on both, and supports LDAP.

After the previous story about authentication of Linux services against your USB ActiveKey, I received a lot of questions about using actual web applications with that same key. Is it possible? Well, as some people already pointed out in the comments, sure it is.

As I started working for my new employer, I got a new laptop. Linux is allowed here (thank goodness for that!) so I decided to go for a Debian install. I also got this nifty USB ActiveKey token, which can be used to authenticate to a plethora of services - Windows domain login, SAP login, ... fun stuff. But what about Linux? It turns out you can make good use of this key for Linux authentication too.

Since mediatomb doesn't care much about what it serves, it's not that hard to have it serve dvd movies from an ISO file. A PlayStation 3 however is rather picky when it comes to video formats, so getting the three to play along can get interesting.

Mediatomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface. It allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.

Sony's PlayStation 3 is one of those UPnP compatible devices - but it's got its quirks. It took me a while to get my setup working the way I like it, so I guessed I might just as well post my config up here.

First of all the config file, located in /etc/mediatomb/config.xml:

So, you've finally got an SGI of your own. You kind of like the system, you want to contribute something to the IRIX community in general and more specifically to the community that helped you making your first steps in the IRIX world: Nekochan. You're okay with building apps from source, and you don't care about having to tweak a bit here and there to get stuff to run properly.

Well, IRIX packages - tardists - don't grow on trees. It all boils down to a number of SGI enthousiasts who build software on their machines in their free time, and package it up for the rest of the community to enjoy. Now, compiling an application on IRIX isn't that painful (yes, there are exceptions of course... OpenOffice, anyone?) but getting a decent tardist from it is a totally different cup of tea.