A Plague!
Our lilly-pilly tree is hosting about 10 million plague soldier beetles. They've decided that's not enough for them and are now infesting our lawn, wattle trees, and in fact anything green and plenty of non-green things too.
Upgrade, they said…
I figured OS X Server 10.8 was probably ready enough for me to upgrade to from 10.7, given it's half a year old and had two point releases, so did this over the weekend. This turns out to have been harder than it could have, due to the opacity of some of the components.
The App Store refused to replace Server.app from Lion Server. Fine, move aside the old one and place the new one in /Applications. This is required now because it contains many server binaries, it's not just a configuration tool.
Once this was done, the new Server.app refused to communicate with the server daemon, complaining about “SSL error has ocurred… blah blah whatever”. Solution from apple communities: Delete from the system keychain any certificates and private keys for previous computer names.
Finally, the mail server was running but broken in a few different ways. I have some custom filtering rules, HELO checks etc. The new Server.app kindly moved everything from /etc to a new home somewhere in /Library/Server/Mail/… which is apparently the cool place now. Unfortunately all the config entries in main.cf didn't know about that and were looking into /etc/postfix. OK fix all them up.
The last gotcha was the email virtual host configuration got destroyed so I had to reset them in the new Server.app.
One more thing: the server-side Address book and Calendars were destroyed. One can restore from Time Machine the address book entries by enabling debug options, but the calendar I'm going to assume is gone for good.
EDIT: Another one more thing: web virtual hosts had their locations defaulted from their custom configuration in Lion Server.
Apart from that it all seems OK now.
Roof
So we decided to install some storage space in our roof cavity. The problem with these “old” houses is that they were built when nobody owned anything, so they didn't bother with cupboards. In the modern era we all have many cubic metres of plastic from China, so we need somewhere to put it all.
It turned out to be the usual drama when getting other people in to do a job: basically there were problems every step of the way, from the dodgy quote through to actually getting the job finished. Yet to do by the contractors: fix the ladder, install power outlet. Yet to do by us: finish painting walls, seal floors, install shelving or whatever, put things up there that we wish to keep.
France
So we went to France a few weeks ago. Here are some pictures. More pictures. Some more pictures. Look, more pictures. And a few more. Yet more pictures. The last ones. Oh, except for these ones.
Of note:
- Cars in Australia are twice the size of French cars. In the seven weeks we spotted just a few X5-sized vehicles. Most people had Astra-sized or smaller cars. Over here of course it's only a matter of time before we are all driving these again.
- Rohan's breathing was fine the entire time we were away. On the second night back, his asthma started up again. So he's either allergic to our house or to Melbourne generally…
- Food in France was ⅔ the price of food in Melbourne, even allowing for the exchange rate.
- Diesel fuel was the same number, about 1.50, but in Euros. Unattended supermarket fuel stations didn't accept our credit cards, which was a pity because they were cheaper, about 1€35.
- Villages are actually somewhere people might want to live.
- Having all the shops shut over lunch and from Saturday afternoon through to Monday morning feels like growing up in Brisbane 30 years ago. In a nice but a little annoying way.
- You can buy a prepaid phone sim card in the store using google translate. However, Orange France's internet access plans make Telstra's appear good value.
- The sun is very soft. Even when it was hot, we could stay out all day. We never felt sunburnt as we would in Australia if we were exposed for more than ten minutes.
- There is no brown grass.
Tripping
So we went to the Grampians last week. We camped at Trooper's Creek. This was a good base camp location; there were walks direct from the campground plus plenty close by. The kids got to climb on rocks most days, we cooked on an open fire, and there was a small creek to play beside (too cold and small to actually get in to). Furthermore there were some really chubby wallabies who'd take food from your hand, so many clumps of grass and leaves were thus disbursed.