Alan Blaine Whitney

The other day I was thinking some about reloading shells. The process of taking spent rifle brass, and making them ready to go again. I am reloading for .270 winchester. The load my rifle has fellen in love with is 130 grain hornady SST in front of 55 grains of IMR-4350, touched off by a CCI 200 primers. Rifle groups pretty good with them.

Just thought I would share my cost. For 100 rounds, I need about 3/4 of a pound of powder, 100 bullets, 100 primers. I have plenty of brass, so this assumes that is not an issue. Plus 30.06 brass is easy to come by, which is one trip in the resizing die and becomes 270 brass.

Here are the cost of making 100 rounds of ammo.

So midwayusa is the cheapest, but it cost about 30 to ship the stuff. Cabelas is pretty good too, but about a three hour drive away. Even buying components locally at van raymonds is cheaper than buying pre-loaded ammo at cabelas.

So in theory reloading saves about 55% the cost of buying pre-loaded factory ammo. It’s generally more accurate to boot and you can customize loads to your gun. Reloading is fun too.

The down side of reloading, you actually don’t save a penny. I am not even talking about the up front equipment cost. I mean, you will shoot twice as much as before, and you shoot away any savings you may of had, but it’s fun.

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At my place of employment, sephone internet solutions, we just finished our debian upgrades. Overall I have huge respect for debian and the apt package tool. Overall the migration from etch to lenny across several servers was easy, except for one back.

One server required the bnx2 firmware for a Broadcom NetXtreme II NIC. For one reason or another, the bnx2 driver was not found after doing a standard debian upgrade. This was quite a problem. After apt finished with what looked like a flawless upgraded, I rebooted the box and it had no network interfaces.

After messing with udev and dmesgs for a while, I was able to find this in a log file

Feb 15 14:29:34 sentry kernel: [ 1856.770927] Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet Driver bnx2 v1.7.5 (April 29, 2008)
Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1857.257121] firmware: requesting bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw
Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1857.450033] bnx2: Cant load firmware file bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw
Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1857.450033] bnx2: probe of 0000:05:00.0 failed with error -2
Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1857.833817] firmware: requesting bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw
Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1858.185818] bnx2: Cant load firmware file bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw
Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1858.185818] bnx2: probe of 0000:09:00.0 failed with error -2

After finding that, I asked a co-worker to manual download the package through a browser on a different machine, put it on a CD, and manually place the file as /lib/firmware/bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw.

With the file now there I needed to try to reload that module

modprobe -r bnx2
modprobe bnx2
/etc/init.d/networking restart

Lo and behold, I now had network. With the network working, I wanted to install the proper debian package: firmware-bnx2, which is found in non-free, which I already had in /etc/apt/sources.list, but first, I needed to get rid of the file I put in there, in case it messed anything

rm /lib/firmware/bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw
apt-get install firmware-bnx2

I rebooted to make sure that it was going to work. Later it came to me that there was a much simpler solution to this problem, reboot, and in the grub menu, pick the etch kernel, it should boot with network, install firmware-bnx2 and reboot to the new kernel. I had not thought of that until later though.

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