Andrew Beresford's Blog

I just had to ring the police!

At about 9pm this evening, I heard a load of banging from the house next door, which I know is unoccupied. So I look out of the window and I must have distubed them becuase they ran off around the back of the houses to the road at the front.

I had a quick look around outside, and saw no one, but I decided to ring the police and report it.

Five minutes later, four police officers in two cars appear.

With the benefit of torches, it’s possible to see that someone tried to break into my neighbour’s house. They’ve beaten in the door and cracked a window.

I’ll be super paranoid of the quietest creak coming from there now.

… how many computers do I use. They meant, at work and at a home, how many do I use on a day to day basis.

It took me a while to work out, but here’s a semi-detailed answer;

• monkey. monkey is my main home workstation. I use it when I am working from home, or for playing the odd game, although I’m not much of a gamer (though recently I’ve been playing Speedball 2 – a game from the early 90′s I used to play). I’ve had monkey, in various forms, for the past ten years, although I suspect the only original part is the floppy disk drive.
• coal. coal is my main home file server. It stores all my files, music, videos and all the other tat you keep. It also acts as a DNS server, LDAP replica and shares out music via DAAP (iTunes).
• diamond. diamond is my firewall and wireless access point.
• moon. moon is my test box. At the moment I am trying out Nexenta on it so I can run my home directory on ZFS (over NFS).
• gold. gold is a big machine that I have (14 CPUs and 4.5GB RAM). It is currently turned off as it uses quite a lot of electricity. I use it if I need a large SMP machine (which is rarely).
• rock. rock is my PVR machine for recording and watching TV. It is currently turned off.
• tintin. tintin is my Mac laptop. I use it when I am out and about – or lazing in bed!
• terrapin. terrapin is my main workstation at work
• tortoise. tortoise is my work NFS and test server. It has also been known to share music out via DAAP (iTunes).

That brings the number to 9. 6 at home, 1 laptop and 2 at work.

That’s not right.