Sunday, February 26, 2006

The new Winnie, the Pooh, ride in Disneyland - bah

[ok, maybe not so new anymore...]
... but what a shame. In place of a nice meadow where kids could greet and meet Winnie, the Pooh and his friends, Disney, in their infinite wisdom, installed a "Winnie the Pooh" ride.
Fine, I can live with adding more rides (in the end this *is* an amusement park), but why in the world did they have to make it this scary?
It starts out with a pretty scene in Pooh's house, then slips into a pitch-black dark tunnel with a rotating Pooh image running round the walls (apparently we are now transferred into his dream land), and ride through a ridiculous scene with funky patterns, lots of honey and ... oh, even more honey.

What bothers me is that this ride is most likely used by little children, and fans of Winnie, the Pooh (of all ages). Most of the ride is spent in this weird dream, that has barely anything to do with Pooh (aside from his image and lots of honey). It would have been so nice to build a ride that celebrates virtues that regularly come up in the books and movies, like friendship or adventure.

This one, though, is rather disappointingly flat.

The only positive thing was the very short wait time... (5 mins, compared to 65 minutes at Splash Mountain on the other side of the way).

Solaris 10, dhcp and hostname

Solaris 10 relies on dhcpd to pass it a valid hostname. If that doesn't happen the hostname is set to "unkown".

Fix: Set the host-name option in dhcpd.conf when using isc-dhcpd.

host dopey {
hardware ethernet 08:00:20:c1:95:e8;
option host-name "dopey";

Alternatives are either hacking the init scripts (basically replace "unknown" with the hostname you want), or writing a custom init script.

Bacula and Backups

Trying to continue with Amanda and 20GB native tapes to back up 60+GB of data is an exercise in futility. I installed Bacula on Dopey months ago. To configure it I used

$ ./configure --sbindir=/usr/local/bacula/bin --sysconfdir=/etc/bacula
--with-pid-dir=/var/run/ --with-subsys-dir=/var/run/

To start it all up:

bash-3.00# cd /etc/bacula
bash-3.00# ./startmysql
bash-3.00# Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /usr/local/mysql/data

bash-3.00# ./bacula start
Starting the Bacula Storage daemon
Starting the Bacula File daemon
Starting the Bacula Director daemon

For OpenBSD, Bacula only supports the file daemon, so we use
./configure --sbindir-pid-dir=/var/run/ --with-subsys-dir=/var/run/

To run jobs, use bconsole and 'run <jobname>'.