Chris’s Blog

Moved into the new school on Monday. Seems good so far. There are around 680 students, or 19 classes. Going to be a boring two weeks of self introductions. The trip here is a lot less painful than the previous school, its 2 minutes on the train to Chiba (from Honchiba) a 4 minute wait for another train to Inage (about 5 minutes). From Inage its around a 7 minute bus trip and a 2 minute walk. I can finally wake up at a semi reasonable hour (6.40).

Some of you in Japan may have seen these before. This is a scan of the school resource product catalog. Most of the schools I have been to have at least two of the pole things lying around. Haven’t seen the shield at school tho.

Finally a program that will sync my Firefox settings across computers. I have been waiting so long for a program like this. It will synchronize and encrypt your cookies, saved passwords, bookmarks, history and tabs/windows. Unfortunately it will not synchronize your plugins/addons.

Grab it now from:
http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/

As you can clearly see below, there is a mock up of the original XBOX “ZBOX”. What I find interesting is that someone in Japan knew about the first XBOX, and actually included it in a cartoon. This was taken from one of the ‘Educational’ books from my schools library. I didn’t bother getting the title or anything though.

UPDATE: Thanks to Brian Ashcraft (Kotaku) I now know the title; Kochikame

I have spent the last few weeks organizing a change for my domain registrar (websitespot.com) so I can have full control over the name servers for the domain. I have done this because I was previously unable to host websites due to the dynamic nature of my IP address.

No problems anymore. I have purchased custom dns services from dyndns.org and by using their name servers, I can update the IP address for the domain name when needed using their client.

Total cost for one year (not including my own internet, server costs) around $32. Thats the .com domain for about $6.95 and the custom DNS for about $25 (US$)

Next up (after saving enough) I’m planning on getting a couple UPS’s to make sure that turning on the microwave and jug at the same time doesn’t kill the power to the servers - and the rest of my house.

I have recently purchased two Dell servers (via Yahoo Auctions Japan). I have a Poweredge 650 and a Poweredge 850. I have set the 650 up as a router (I know, complete overkill) running pfsense - a great free firewall system that supports a huge variety of hardware. I tried some other firewall systems, but none would detect the raid card, so I really had no choice.

To go into a bit more detail regarding the ‘overkill’ - The system (650) is running a 2.4ghz Pentium 4, with a gig a ram and four gigabytes of raid0 hard drive space. The system is usually running with about 4% cpu and 12% memory usage, but I’ve had it jump up to 60% sometimes. Now I wont have a problem with the router dying with all that P2P traffic over my fiber (100mbps) connection.

The other server (850) I have setup as a domain controller / mail server / web server (apahce) with the usuals PHP, MYSQL and so on. It is currently running this website. Only problem is I haven’t (as of yet) setup a backup routine. So if this dies, I’m going to be very sad. Its currently running a dual core 3ghz Pentium 4 with two gigs of ram and around 40gb of hard drive space.

The overall cost was very reasonable. The 650 set me back about 10,500 yen ($100) and the 850 was around 16,000 yen ($150) . Only problem was that I was orignally trying to build the servers myself. I had picked up a 650 and 850 server chassis for about 2000 yen ($20) and ordered the motherboard and other parts from the US.

The cost of the motherboard and backplane board cost more than buying the whole second hand 850. So now I have alot of unused second hand parts for the servers. If you are interested in purchasing them (in Japan) pop me an email.