barnskilinux

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

LinuxISOtorrent.com :: Linux ISO Torrents - does what it says on the tin.

Friday, May 27, 2005

freshmeat.net: Project details for AquaLightBlue GTK 2; give your Linux desktop a Mac OS X flavour :)

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

..and the answer to my previous post is given in the mambo forums: Mambo - A PHP & MySQL Content Management System - Help! importing DB generates syntax errors.
Basically, it's an issue where the backup file has some SQL that includes SQL reserved words as column names. SQL jibs when this happens, unless the offending column names are delimited by `backticks` to indicate that they should not be parsed as a reserved word.
There were two instances in my backup which I corrected by hand, but to avoid future problems, if you do a DB backup from the command line using mysqldump, you need to include the option;
--quote-names, -Q
Note that this is default in MySQL 4.1.1 and later, but since I am using Debian stable, I am only on 3.23.49, so I will need to specify it.

Holy crap, I am a dumbass. Today I hosed my Mambo site by dropping the MySQL database, thinking I was connected to a different server. :(
Anyway, I have an up to date backup of the database created using mysqldump, which has created an sql file. It should be piss to restore the database from this file, as per Google Answers: MySQL dump/import command, but it's not. :( :(
Basically, I get an error when I try the restore as follows:
ERROR 1064 at line 138: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'option varchar(50) NOT NULL default '',
ordering int(11) NOT NULL default '0',' at line 9

No idea what's causing this, but it is really causing me grief.

Monday, May 16, 2005

The Observer | Business | The Networker: John Naughton - an article following recent advice from BECTA to UK schools that they should ditch ms systems.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

So, I recently read an article extolling the virtues of nagios as a network (server) monitoring system, and have been trialling it for a customer who needs an open source solution. Problem is, the nsclient agent for windows servers is no longer being developed, and doesn't seem to support Win2003. I have, however, just found NC_Net, which is supposed to be a drop-in replacement that will do Win2k and Win2003 (but not NT 4.0), which is fine by me. (More on the Nagios forums here).
Trouble may be brewing though, becauseI have now also found Zabbix, which also looks very promising as an alternative to Nagios, as it uses a proper database backend. I guess I'll have to evaluate both.......

Monday, May 09, 2005

nsclient FAQ - it's either this or using SNMP to monitor your windoze servers using nagios.

ONLamp.com: Nagios, Part 2 - a useful overview of nagios configuration.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Novell have launched Open Enterprise Server, which is basically Netware combined with the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server offering. This is hopefully where things start to get interesting; if I can run Directory Services, applications, file & print and collaboration services off of a supported Linux platform with Linux and Microsoft Client compatibility (admittedly with a software install) and Group Policy (managed through Zen), then maybe I can really start to ditch Microsoft? It's early days still, but Novell might just put together a contender.
Novell have also posted a slightly misleading but amusing advert from the "Institute for Information Therapy", aimed at NT 4.0 users.

Thursday, May 05, 2005

DarwinPorts - run open source apps on OS X!
It's difficult to know which way to go now, as I've been meaning to look at fink for a while, and maybe even Gentoo for Mac OS X, both of which also provide Open Source apps for OS X.
I wonder if you could run all three.......