August 19th, 2010 by pete
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This should get filed under the ‘I need to remember this for the next time it happens’ category.
Installing OSSIM 2.3.1 (Debian based Open Source SIEM system) onto a Dell Poweredge 1950 would succeed but the network would not function. Doing an ‘rmmod bnx2′ and ‘modprobe bnx2′ would resolve the problem but it was no useful answer for a production system.
It turns out that the firmware isn’t installed for the Broadcom NIC as shown by the dmesg entries:
bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw
bnx2: Can't load firmware file "bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw"
Simple answer to get running – download the firmware-bnx2 0.26 from http://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-bnx2, copy it to the target system and perform a dpkg -i firmware-bnx2_0.26_all.deb. This will trigger a rebuild of the initrd, so you should be able to do a restart and have networking available straight away:
bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw
bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-rv2p-06-4.6.16.fw
eth1: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B1) PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz found at mem f4000000, IRQ 16, node addr 00:15:c5:eb:0f:d7
June 18th, 2010 by pete
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After many months of inaction, I finally managed to drag my self outside. Winter is over, Spring is spring and I came across this beautiful scene:

January 6th, 2010 by pete
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Not leaving the house today. Alas, that doesn’t mean I don’t work, but there’ll probably be time for a snowman or two.
This is Cold Ash hill this morning – that’s a 1:10 hill, so there’s sod all chance of anyone getting up it unless they have a good 4WD car.
It’s still snowing.

December 25th, 2009 by pete
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I know, it’s a geeky, slightly sad and to some, boring thing. I don’t care
Cold Ash Weather Page
December 19th, 2009 by pete
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This took way too long. I’ve uploaded a scanned and OCRed version of a document that my Grandad, Jim Harpur, dictated to someone from the National Archives in Ireland back in 1950. Since I’ve done some of the Connolly side of the family, I thought it would be great to get some Harpur notes on here as well. I know I can’t find my paper copy of these notes, so my Ma was good enough to send them over again, as well as some other documents that I need to get scanned. Hopefully, the good folks at Google will index this mine of information for the future.
You can read the Jim Harpur’s recollections starting here