27 April, 2014
Our internet provider for oak.waxworlds.org is experiencing a fault and oak
is down. For updates, see their fault status
page. I will update this post
when the issue is resolved.
Update: The problem has now been resolved. [2014-04-27]
25 April, 2014
We should be changing the service provider for oak.waxworlds.org some time
today. oaks static IP address will change again. There may be a temporary
disruption to services as this occurs. Most noticeably, email and jabber are
handled by oak.
Update: oak is now down until this evening. [2014-04-25]
Update: DNS has been reconfigured with the new IP address, but may take a few hours to catch up. [2014-04-25]
Update: Everything is working again (barring DNS catching up). [2014-04-25]
6 April, 2014
Our service provider is changing the static IP address of oak.waxworlds.org
in the next few days. There may be a temporary disruption to services as this
occurs. Most noticeably, email and jabber are handled by oak. I'll update as
there is more information.
Update: oak is down and will remain so until this evening. [2014-04-08]
Update: oak is back up with its new IP address (although there will be a delay as DNS catches up). [2014-04-09]
1 July, 2013
Over the next few weeks the software running on all the servers will be upgraded to Debian 7. This should be uneventful, insofar as users are concerned, but please let me know if you find something that isn't working as expected.
Update: ash has been upgraded. [2013-07-23]
Update: oak has been upgraded. [2013-08-22]
Update: The issue with authenticating to send emails from outside of the network has been fixed. [2013-08-27]
1 December, 2012
As planned, the waxworlds.org root certificate was changed today, to avoid it expiring. All service certificates have also been replaced for ones signed by the new root certificate. The new root certificate will expire in 2100, so I shouldn't need to replace it again any time soon.
29 November, 2012
Apologies to anyone having difficulty accessing waxworlds.org services (in particular, jabber and mail). Our service provider has had a routing problem since the early hours of this morning. See their fault status page for more information.
Update: The issue seems to have been fixed. [1pm]
25 November, 2012
Apologies to account holders trying to send email remotely. SMTP authentication (which has to be over SSL) wasn't working, but it is now.
Quick reminder: less than a week before the waxworlds.org root CA certificate changes.
The Arduino IDE is nice to get beginners started, but you’ll quickly hit its limitations. And if, like me, you found an option in the preferences dialogue that enables an external editor, you’ll have been disappointed to find that it seems only to disable the internal editor!
It is possible to work entirely outside the IDE, with your own editor (like Emacs or Eclipse) and build your projects from the command line (or in another IDE). Here’s one way to do it…
You should make sure that the Arduino IDE is working first. This will ensure the compiler, C-library an Arduino libraries are installed and working correctly and that you can communicate with your Arduino. Then you’ll want to use a Makefile. I’ve spent some time writing one, in collaboration with quite a few other people, an it’s available here. It’s very easy to use, quite fully-featured, and as compatible with the IDE as possible. (Other makefiles also exist, of course.)
OK, so to build your project outside the IDE, you’ll need to do the following:
Create yourself a `Makefile`, with the following in:
Obviously, you should replace `~/src/arduino.mk` with the location you saved the Aruino makefile. Having saved `Makefile`, you can run `make boards` to see what board names exist. Then, you should set the `BOARD` variable correctly (“uno” may not be correct).
And that’s it!
To build your project, you should only have to type
To upload it to the Arduino board, go
(If it can’t detect your Arduino by its self, you may need to set the SERIALDEV variable in your Makefile.)
And if you want to use the Serial Monitor from the Arduino IDE without running the IDE, you can achieve this by going
This actually runs GNU screen. (You’ll need to remember the shortcut keys to kill screen (^a k, by default) so that you can get out of it!)
If something goes wrong or isn’t working, you should have a look at the documentation for arduino.mk.
14 November, 2012
In September next year the root certificate that is used to sign all waxworlds.org certificates will expire. It will have to be replaced (along with all waxworlds.org certificates).
So, on 1st December (a couple of weeks time), I will be changing the root certificate. Or, more accurately, I will be replacing every waxworlds.org certificate with ones that are signed by a new root certificate.
You will need to have the new root certificate installed in your browsers, mail clients and wherever else you want to trust waxworlds.org SSL/TLS certificates. The new certificate is here:
Sorry for the inconvenience.
12 November, 2012
The whole of waxworlds.org has been dark since Sunday morning. This was the result of two factors.
Oak failed catastrophically at 7:52am on 11th November.
Since the recent migration (in June), the root nameservers have had the wrong IP address for ns2.waxworlds.org. So in the absence of oak, waxworlds.org wasn't resolving at all.
The DNS issue has been corrected.
Oak is now a brand new machine with a fresh OS install. As a consequence, there may be a few loose ends that aren't set up quite right. In particular, oak handles our mail, DNS, jabber and has web and database servers on it. I would appreciate being told about any issues that anyone notices.
Long live the new oak.
