With help from the Pepsi Refresh Challenge, Matt Olander and some close friends are taking on a feat of Epic proportions – to make daily travel less harmful.  Stay healthy and happy by harnessing the power of your Body (and our Sun).  Vote Now! The trike has room for two Adults and enough trunk space for a student’s books or a single mother’s groceries.

I have been running alpha versions of PC-BSD Hubble Edition for the last few weeks as iXsystems transitioned into a brand new production facility.  It’s been a pretty amazing process thus far.   It’s great to be a part of something as it’s growing, especially when the team feels more like a family than anything.  For a sneak peak of our new place, check out this video:

We implemented a django-based serial tracking system built on FreeBSD.  Systems and components will be scanned in at the assembly line (pictured below).  After a new order is placed, all systems in that order are scanned in, then each component is scanned in for each system so that we can easily locate one bad hard drive in an order (amongst several other things).  There are several stages to each build that are also tracked dynamically throughout the build process.  Obviously I can’t leak all the sexy details, though…

The workstations in production are running the PC-BSD operating system.  At the moment, we’re testing PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha on the Eee Box.  Our requirements were minimal: does the barcode scanner work? Yes. Does konqueror load the web app? Yes. Great! It’s production ready! I was going to use PC-BSD 7.1.1 instead of 8.0 because we would normally never put an alpha in a production environment.  In this case, the nic was too new and didn’t work properly in FreeBSD 7.2-PRERELEASE so I had to use FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 (PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha).

Here’s the latest screenshot I have of PC-BSD 8.0 Alpha running on my desktop at work.

That’s all for now. I’ll post more screenshots as I take them. Thanks for stopping by!

This post may be considered trivial to most of you, but I thought I’d post it up here for the sake of documentation.

The production manager approached me this morning and asked if I could make a bootable ISO for a customer who needed to flash the BIOS of several servers.  I suggested they PXE boot, but because of the volume of servers they have with PXE booting disabled, human involvement would be unavoidable.

I have several bootable floppies for flashing BIOSes, but our customer had specific configuration requests, so I had to switch out the zipped ROM file located within the floppy image.  Simple enough, right?