barnskilinux

2007-04-23T18:53:00.000Z

Red Hat have published a useful article on Linux daemons, explaining what they each do, and in what circumstances you could disable them. This is obviously good for security and performance.

If you want to really go to town on performance, you might also consider optimising your ext3 volumes :)

2007-02-05T17:58:00.000Z

Implementing OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) on a Dell PowerEdge running Red Hat Enterprise Linux today, I found this, which is the unofficial Dell repository for OMSA. They even provide a couple of scripts to help you import the GPG keys, set the repo up and install the latest version over the net.
Worked like a charm :)

2007-02-01T16:16:00.000Z

I have been refining my use of Linux as an iTunes client, so I can get a crappy old machine running Linux and use it to access my entire iTunes library over the network. Output can then be to anything via the headphone jack.
To achieve this with Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), I have found that the following works:
apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.8-plugins
Then edit /etc/default/avahi-daemon so that
AVAHI_DAEMON_START=1
Restart avahi-daemon (or reboot), and Rhythmbox now discovers and plays all your local iTunes shared libraries.
:)

2006-12-01T13:00:00.000Z

GNU screen is like a window manager for terminal sessions - when you invoke screen, you can have multiple terminals (screen windows) open and running different processes, a bit like having the multiple desktop spaces in Gnome or KDE.

You can also "detach" screen, which puts all your active screen windows into the background and returns you to your default terminal session. You have now quit screen. This is a bit like disconnecting from a terminal server session - you can log off and log on again later from another machine, and re-attach your screen session. At this point, you can pick up all the processes you left running in your screen windows.

Invoke by using
screen

Screen windows are numbered 0-9

Create a new screen window with
ctrl-a c

Switch to next screen window with
ctrl-a n

Switch to previous with
ctrl-a p

Switch to screen window x with
ctrl-a x

Detach a screen from terminal (put screen windows in background) with
ctrl-a d
note that closing a terminal session without logging out also appears to detach active screen windows.

A detached screen (including all it's windows) can be resumed by invoking screen with the -r option:
screen -r
if you have multiple disconnected screen sessions, you will be told how to reconnect to one of your choice.

This pretty much covers what I need GNU screen for right now, but as is often the way with GNU/Linux software, it is immensely powerful and does way more than this. A screen users manual is here.

2006-11-01T11:59:00.000Z

I have previously mentioned an article by AnandTech in which they documented a fairly convincing lab exercise in which it was shown that Mac OS X Tiger Server made a pretty poor show of running MySQL. In fact, they claimed, OS X was up to 5 times slower than Linux running the same benchmarks on the same G5 hardware.

We have a customer who presently run a LAMP application (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) that we set up for them on Red Hat Linux, running on Dell PowerEdge hardware and it's doing a sterling job.

Trouble is that they now want to scale up quite significantly, and the server that they presently have can't expand to give them enough storage without an external array (bear with me here).

So, I got to thinking about how we could give them a good value proposition in terms of storage expansion, and that led me to Xserve RAID. I had a chance to chat to the Apple guys at this years Mac Expo, and found out that the Xserve RAID is in fact Red Hat Certified, so that opens up a good option in terms of just bunging more storage on the PowerEdge server. Further research indicates that this may only be for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, and we are running 4, so I don't know where that leaves us.

The Apple guys also said that the MySQL performance problem had been addressed in 10.4.7 (but they would). So, while we're at it, we might want to beef up the processing side of things, so why not look at a nice spanky 64-bit Intel Xserve if it's all good now? And if we've got an Xserve and Xserve RAID, then Mac OS X might not be such a bad idea, but that brings us back to the MySQL performance problem.

However, I reasoned that since OS X is now on Intel, perhaps the situation may have changed. A bit more research has led me to find that firstly, AnandTech's findings were skewed, and secondly that OS X may be a more compelling option after all (great article).

2006-09-19T07:37:00.000Z

The Inside Security Rescue Toolkit (INSERT) is a complete, bootable linux system. It comes with a graphical user interface running the fluxbox window manager while still being sufficiently small to fit on a credit card-sized CD-ROM. INSERT contains a multitude of useful tools to be at your hand in a variety of situations:

full read-write support for NTFS-partitions using captive and linux-ntfs
support for various file system types:
locally: EXT2,EXT3,REISERFS,REISER4,JFS,XFS,NTFS,FAT,MSDOS,MINIX,UDF,HFS,HFS+,HPFS,UFS,UNIONFS
net based: NFS,SMBFS,CIFS,NCPFS,SSHFS,AFS
support for linux software RAID and LVM2
support for WLAN adapters
network analysis (e.g. nmap, tcpdump)
disaster recovery (e.g. gparted, gpart, partimage, testdisk, recover)
virus scanning (Clam Antivirus with GUI avscan)
computer forensics (e.g. chkrootkit, foremost, rootkit hunter)
surf the internet (e.g. the web browser dillo [enhanced version], the graphical FTP client gFTP)
network boot server to boot network boot enabled clients that cannot boot from the CD (insert-remote)
installation on a USB memory stick (usb-install)
based on Linux kernel 2.6.12.5 and Knoppix 4.0.2

2006-06-01T16:30:00.000Z

xubuntu is the low-power, small-footprint version of ubuntu (using xfce):
"Xubuntu is the newest official Ubuntu derivative distribution, using the
Xfce desktop environment and a selection of GTK2 applications. Its
lightweight footprint is well suited for low-end hardware and thin
clients. Xubuntu builds on the solid foundation of Ubuntu, with
world-class hardware support and access to a vast repository of
additional software.
=== On the Desktop ===

* Xfce 4.4beta1 including a more flexible panel, many panel plugins
and icons on the desktop
* Thunar file manager
* GDM desktop manager
* Gnome Office (latest Abiword and Gnumeric)
* Evince document viewer
* Xarchiver archive manager
* Xfburn simple CD burner
* Xubuntu System Tools for GUI system administration
* Firefox 1.5.0.3
* Thunderbird 1.5.0.2
* Package updates manager
* Graphical .deb package installer (''GDebi'')

* New documentation (''Xubuntu Desktop Guide'')
* New and more consistent artwork

and more.

In addition, OpenOffice.org and Gnome CUPS Manager are included on the
alternate CD but not installed by default."

2006-05-25T12:36:00.000Z

This is an awesome article on software mirroring under Linux - I came a cropper today because I didn't understand the requirement to manually configure grub before the first disk in the mirror fails (D'OH!). The article also describes rebuilding the mirrored pair when yu've added a fresh disk following a failure. Very handy indeed :)

2006-05-25T10:27:00.000Z

OpenSourceCMS.com is a handy site that demos all kinds of open source CMS systems. You can go and play with them before having to go through the pain of an install yourself, and the systems are wiped clean every 2 hours so you can wreak whatever havoc you like :)

2006-05-15T08:22:00.000Z

SELinux from scratch - an article from IBM on how to implement SELinux on systems that are not SELinux aware. This might be a handy way to get to understand SELinux.......

2006-03-21T07:53:00.000Z

Stuff that I have only just come to know about: Nexenta is a GNU/Solaris distribution. Whilst not part of the Debian project, they have used Debian and the OpenSolaris kernel to make a distro. Nice.
Also FreeBSD 6.0 has been released.

2006-02-25T20:19:00.000Z

IBM have published some useful LPI Exam Prep guides.

2006-02-10T16:45:00.000Z

A new project that I am farting about with at home is getting Linux running on an old Ultra 5 that I have lying about. Why? - well the old Ultrasparc is an incredibly well made and robust hardware platform - I've seen these things running Solaris as servers in dusty back rooms without interruption for years. Plus, the geek factor of running one of these things is awesome.
I presently host a small Mambo site for my own use from home, and right now it's on a crappy old Dell PC with a PII 333 CPU and 312MB RAM. The 64-bit 400MHz UltraSparc IIi CPU with 265MB RAM is therefore almost an upgrade :)
This machine also allows me to remotely connect in and test connections over the net to stuff I set up for customers, so I need X and a graphical web browser.
Anyway, installing Debian on the Ultra5 was a piece of cake. However, things are getting a bit more tricky now that I'm fetterng with it, so I thought I'd make some notes.
I installed Debian 3.1 Sparc on the Ultra 5 by simply giving it a "boot cdrom" command from the "ok" OpenBoot prompt and following the normal debian installer. My CD was a netinst job, and I just selected to install the graphical environment, as I'll apt everything else as I need it.
My Ultra5 has a Sun m64 graphics head, which Sun made a big song and dance about when it was new, but it turns out that it's pretty much an ATI Rage chipset, so I selected ATI for the graphics, and X was up and well, except the mouse didn't work.
I have one of the newer 3-button sun mice that connects to the keyboard using a PS/2 type connector. This post helped me out here, as I was able to use od as described to determine that I needed to use the /dev/sunmouse identifier. Once I'd hacked this into the X config file, I was good to go.
At this point I had an Ultra5 running Debian Sarge on a stock 2.4 kernel, with X and networking, which is all I need (I'm not bothered about sound - it's a server). So far, so good.
And this is where I balls it up.......
Next I wanted to upgrade to a 2.6 kernel. Mainly this was because I like to be up to date, but stable and the 2.6 kernel in the Debian stable tree gives you this. Secondarily, at boot time, I was getting some errors relating to the hard disk on the Ultra5, and I had read somewhere that these are fixed in the 2.6 kernel.
So, I used apt to install a stable 2.6 kernel for 64-bit sparc, and rebooted. The disk errors were gone, but so was X, and I couldn't log in at the console as the keymap was buggered. Nice.
The answers to almost all of this are here in this article, but this still didn't get my mouse going again. Using od agan, I was able to determine that the 2.6 kernel saw my mouse as /dev/psaux now, rather than /dev/sunmouse. Once I realised that I needed to tell it to use the PS/2 protocol, we were in business again.
At this point, I have an Ultra5 running Debian Linux on a 64-bit 2.6 kernel with X. I am a happy customer - this server will hopefully run for years!
My current XF86Config-4 file has stanzas for both 2.4 and 2.6 kernel device maps, so you could just chop and change which are selected in the ServerLayout stanza as appropriate. Download my XF86Config-4 here.
Next steps will be to install and configure Apache, MySQL etc., but that's for another day. If there's anything unusual involved , I'll post it.

2006-02-10T08:37:00.000Z

PSSH is another open source ssh client for Palm OS 5 - works fine on the Treo 650, apparently.

2006-02-06T12:23:00.000Z

I'm real pissed off with having no iTunes client on Linux, as my entire music library is available from a mt-daapd server at home. This is a great solution, as I mostly use Macs and can stream my music wherever I am.
However, I have a crappy old intel laptop that I thought I might use as a dedicated device for streaming music in my front room (it's too crappy for real use as a computer any more - Celeron 333, maxed out at 128MB RAM, 10GB, 800x600 display!). Trouble is, due to the lack of a Linux iTunes client, I have to run Windows on it. :(
I'm now thinking that perhaps running iTunes under WINE might be a plan, and Frank's Corner has some notes that indicate this is a real possibility. I'll post back if I ever get round to working on it (I'm also having problems with WPA under Linux with it right now).

2006-02-06T10:15:00.000Z

F-Spot is a photo management tool for Gnome - kind of an iPhoto for Linux.

2006-01-31T16:34:00.000Z

25 Reasons to Convert to Linux, compiled by The Linux Information Project

2006-01-25T09:14:00.000Z

WPAHowto - Ubuntu Wiki

2006-01-20T16:27:00.000Z

All About Linux is another blog (much more polished than this one) that deals with Linux. this week there's an interesting post on using Gentoo.

2006-01-19T11:08:00.000Z

Red Hat have put up a page entitled Linux is Easy with some flash animations of how easily you can set up a web server, a file and print server or a network services server (DNS, firewall, DHCP).
There's nothing too advanced here judging by the Apache one. but I guess that's because the Red Hat GUI tools still only allow for basic configuration - in my experience, if you want to do anything advanced you still need to get your hands dirty with .conf files.
That said, this is still a good step towards encouraging Windows sys admins that Linux is not to be feared, and that is the first step towards convincing them that in some roles, it should be embraced.......

2006-01-18T22:17:00.000Z

I'm a long time fan of SmoothWall, but if I was considering an alternative, I'd definitely be evaluating m0n0wall.

2006-01-13T08:33:00.000Z

A useful list of linux commands.

2006-01-10T00:08:00.000Z

Grisoft Freeweb: Grisoft Introduces AVG Free for Linux Virus Protection

2005-12-22T09:47:00.000Z

One of those things I really must find the time to learn about is ClamAV, which is Open Source anti-virus software for UNIX and UNIX-like platforms (i.e. Linux & BSD). There's no file cleaning, but there is real-time scanning and reporting as well as a host of plugins, including one for mail servers.
What's more, there is now the ClamWin Windows port, and (even better) the ClamXav port for OS X.

2005-12-09T09:12:00.000Z

Here's a nice article about a Linux user getting to grips with a Mac mini. What I liked about it was the techie criticism of Apple's O/S - the spinning beach ball syndrome is apparently due to poor parallelism due to the Mach microkernel.

2005-12-08T12:52:00.000Z

Check out the useful essential house-keeping tasks for Ubuntu.
Still doesn't help with my ATI card though......

2005-10-14T08:49:00.000Z

strange symphonies - Blog Archive - Ubuntu 5.10 Preview on R52

2005-10-14T08:09:00.000Z

Ubuntu: Installing VMware Workstation 5.5 RC1 in Breezy - this guy uses symbolic links to fake a correct gcc version.
Alternatively, this guy on the forums actually installs multiple versions of gcc.

2005-10-11T21:25:00.000Z

Matthew Thomas - Blog Archive - My first 48 hours enduring Ubuntu 5.04. An intelligent and interesting critique of Ubuntu from a Mac user's perspective.

2005-10-10T16:37:00.000Z

Howto Script a Secure Copy
or
scripting scp and sftp network file copies

Today I needed to set up a scheduled file copy between two Linux servers. Due to security requirements, I could only use ssh. Here's how I got on.

Before going any further I would like to state that this is, as usual, written so that I can come back to it in 6 months and remind myself how this works. It is therefore written for someone of my Linux abilities, which is to say familiar with Linux, but not a guru. However, if you don't understand at least the basics of TCP/IP networking, Linux system administration, ssh, and public/private key pairs, then this might not be much use to you as understanding of that stuff is implicit in the notes below.

OK, firstly, let me set the scene by saying that:
- the copy had to be a pull operation (internal server pulling from DMZ server)
- the target (DMZ) server only allows SSH protocol 2
- root logins over SSH are disabled

So, the difficulty is that there is no way to script an SSH copy and provide a user password. This script is scheduled, so it must not require any interaction.

The solution is to use a public-private ssh key pair for authentication of the ssh session (this stuff rocks!).

OK, so first I created a user on each server (source and target) with the same username. This is a standard Linux user, as it is only to be used for the purposes of this copy operation. The only caveat is that on the target (DMZ) server, the user has to have read access to the files you want to copy.

Next, I created the ssh key pair on the internal server. The deal is that this server will establish the connection, so it holds the private key. We give the public key to the target server. That way, only our internal server can establish an authenticated session to the target server using the keys (i.e. without a password).

To create the ssh keypair, we log in as our user account created earlier and use the following command:
ssh-keygen -t dsa

Note that this can take a minute on a slow server. When prompted for a password, just hit enter - we are setting a blank password. (If we do not set a blank password, then our scripted copy will require interaction to type the password). You can also specify rsa instead of dsa for the key type for SSH2 if you like (and if you're a nutter and not worried about security, rsa1 is the type for SSH1, but I would not use SSH1 on any production systems as it is insecure).

This creates two files in ~/.ssh:
id_dsa
and
id_dsa.pub

In a fairly self-explanatory naming convention, id_dsa is our private key and id_dsa.pub is our public key. For obvious reasons, do not ever export the private key or make it available over the network in any way, as it can be used to access the target server without a password.

Next, we need to set up the target (DMZ) server to allow ssh connections authenticated by our public key. We do this by logging in as our new user on the target server and editing ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Note that if this file does not exist, you can just create it.

We then set the file up with our new public key by appending our public key to whatever is there already.

Now we test the connection from the internal server to the target (DMZ) server, by issuing the following command on the internal server (logged in as our new user):
sftp targetserver
e.g.
sftp webserver
or
sftp 192.168.0.1

If all is well, you will be straight into an sftp session without being prompted for authentication. This means that the session has been authenticated by the certificate key pair.

Now we can do some scripting!

The command I used today is as follows:
scp -2 -r user@targetserver:/directory/subdirectory /home/user/subdirectory/

Note that this uses scp (secure copy) rather than sftp, as it's a bit less cumbersome for this type of operation. The -2 option forces SSH2, and the -r makes the copy recursive.

So, finally I just chucked this command in a script that also rotates the last three copies on the internal server (so we have the last three days copies on disk) and set it to run in the new user's crontab (sending output to /dev/null, of course).

In summary, this is a nice way of securely harvesting data from a DMZ server to an internal host. The only slight, super-paranoid security concern is that the public key on the target (DMZ) server contains the FQDN hostname of the internal server. This is not an attack vector, but if the DMZ server was compromised, it could give an attacker useful information about the internal DNS naming structure.

Note that experimentation suggested that removing the FQDN name (an indeed the user name) from the public key on the target server still allows connection, but I haven't researched this, and it may well be the case that this would allow connection from any host (or any user) using the private key, rather than just from the internal server (and specified user) so I have not made this change on my production server.

2005-10-04T09:57:00.000Z

This is a nice problem to have to look into: Ubuntu only sees the first 900MB of RAM due to native support for only that much in the default i386 kernel.
Next step is to upgrade the kernel; the question is, which kernel should be used for a Centrino CPU? (I'm guessing 686).

2005-10-04T07:54:00.000Z

GenUX Launches Technical Support | GenUX

2005-10-04T07:19:00.000Z

Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu. Interesting.

2005-10-04T06:52:00.000Z

The next release of Ubuntu will support an LTSP implementation.

2005-09-28T06:51:00.000Z

LXer: 10 Days as a Windows XP User: A GNU Perspective on Things

2005-09-17T16:42:00.000Z

This is a great short article on backup and bare metal restore of a Linux system using tar.

2005-09-14T18:13:00.000Z

All about Linux: How to change the MAC address of your machine. Handy tip.

2005-09-10T12:45:00.000Z

The mt-daapd site has posted about iTunes 5 breakage.
I have updated to 0.2.2 from the nightlies site, and it works like a charm with iTunes 5.

2005-08-31T18:55:00.000Z

I feel like noting that I now use CentOS instead of Fedora Core for my main home server. This is for one main reason: Fedora updates too often.

I use my home server to provide file serving, DNS and iTunes sharing to my home LAN. I also use it as a VMWare workstation for systems design and development work that I do. That's it; Samba, BIND, daapd and VMWare.

When I was running Fedora Core (up until a couple of weeks ago), I would have to fight with VMWare on a regular basis. Fedora Core would release a new kernel every month or two, and often the new kernel was compiled with a newer version of GCC than was installed on the system. Fedora would not provide the newer version of GCC as an update. This breaks VMWare big style, as the vmware-config.pl script that you have to run after a kernel update will not complete if the kernel is compiled with a different version of GCC than is on the system. There are ways around this, but it's a big frickin' pain in the arse to have to go through on a regular basis.

CentOS is a pretty close clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and as such is built with stability and reliability in mind. This means that you get security updates, but not "bleeding edge" software upgrades - updates are much less frequent. As a server, it beats Fedora hands down (although if you were running as a desktop, you might still consider Fedora, as RPMs for apps are more common, cutting-edge features are there, and multimedia is much easier to get working).

2005-08-30T07:04:00.000Z

XYZ Computing - Vista to Open Doors for Desktop Linux.

2005-08-25T19:54:00.000Z

Get It Together - an Open Source, Java-based (?) daap client/server.
Not strictly a Linux or Open Source post, as this runs on Winblows and Mac OS X as well (although why you'd want to use it on those platforms when you have iTunes is not clear). I want this for Linux machines though.

2005-08-24T18:13:00.000Z

davyd: libopendaap/tunesbrowser - debian packages for tunesbrowser and libopendaap.
Untested, but potentially handy.

2005-08-23T14:49:00.000Z

phpMyAdmin is a PHP admin interface for MySQL.

2005-08-22T16:33:00.000Z

Linux World Expo 2005, October, Olympia, London - check it out.

2005-08-18T12:56:00.000Z

This Register article on Solaris 10 does a pretty good job of showing where it's at by comparison with Linux.
I personally run Solaris on Sparc, so many of the problems they ran into don't apply to me......

2005-08-10T13:15:00.000Z

Learn UNIX in 10 minutes - a basic html file giving the basics of basic UNIX shell operations. Handy for thos n00bs ;)

2005-08-08T21:25:00.000Z

Symphony OS is a promising distro, based on Debian and Knoppix. It has a new UI based on FVWM and uses perl and html code for GUI applications. Overall, it promises to be a really simple to use environment. I reckon that next time I get asked if an old PC could be recycled as a web browser kiosk/terminal, then this might be worth a look.

2005-08-03T17:56:00.000Z

Under Novell stewardship, SuSE is going open source. More here.

2005-07-14T11:29:00.000Z

Trustix Secure Linux version 3.0 is out.

2005-07-08T17:19:00.000Z

Server Elements - these guys produce NAS Lite, which is a mini-OS based on Linux that will turn a PC into a dedicated NAS device.

2005-07-08T10:35:00.000Z

Window Maker have released version 0.92.0.

2005-07-05T12:01:00.000Z

Hula Server - Hula. A promising looking Open Source messaging and calendaring server. I heard about this on LugRadio, which is an ace podcast.

2005-07-05T07:44:00.000Z

Comparing security on Windows and Linux: "A more objective method of rating security is to track the number of bug fixes issued for a particular software suite. When compared to Linux, Windows appears to be more prone to flaws by this measure. Recent U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) vulnerability metrics reported 250 episodes for Microsoft Windows, 39 of these having a severity rating of 40 or greater. With Red Hat Linux there were only 46 episodes, of which only with only 3 scored over 40. There are thousands of reports that compare the two operating systems but reports like this by an independent government body, on the relative number of critical flaws between them, should be given greatest consideration."

2005-07-05T06:40:00.000Z

Crash Recovery Kit for Linux - kind of a mini-knoppix with a few useful tools built in, I think.

2005-06-25T15:03:00.000Z

Exploring /proc - useful explanation of the /proc filesystem.

2005-06-21T16:53:00.000Z

Simon Willison: PHP and Apache 2.0 - usefully sums up the problem with PHP and Apache 2. One of the comments mentions that it's OK in RHEL though, which is what I am looking at right now.
Also found this:
"MPMs is how Apache 2 handles multiple web server requests. That is, with multiple processes or multiple threads or some combination. For now, on Linux (and even UNIX) you should only use the (default) prefork module with PHP. This is specified at compile time. Other MPM modules (any involving threaes) break PHP. This is partly because PHP uses a great number of external libraries, and many or most of them are not thread-safe or thread-aware. In any case, Linux 2.4 doesn't handle threads efficiently yet--multiple processes are better (this changes with Linux 2.6, or RedHat 9 with 2.6 threads backported to Linux 2.4).".

2005-06-21T06:54:00.000Z

unknown network activity - a useful discussion. Someone is sending IIS buffer overrun attacks against my web server. Fortunately, I'm running Apache on Linux behind a firewall, so it's not done any damage, other than makng a mess of my log files. Still, these guys have a couple of useful pointers for additional security that I might well take up.
There's also a useful tip here on modifying Apache so that it doesn't bother logging reams of crap when the IIS attack is launched.

2005-06-20T19:19:00.000Z

Knowing Knoppix - Wikibooks is a great reference resource for Knoppix, which helped me out of another situation today.
Sometimes Linux just does rock my pants :)

2005-06-20T10:38:00.000Z

Linux Journal - Doc Searls writes for these guys, I think.

2005-06-18T09:26:00.000Z

Installing Linux on the Libretto (again).

So, the libretto in my life (an old 70ct) is being revived. Why? Well, I have this crazy idea about using TunesBrowser and a WiFi card so that it can sit near my stereo being small and quiet and just be an mp3 player using my daapd shared music library.

So, previously the libretto was running Debian Woody, with a bunch of manually hacked crap to allow it to do WiFi (mainly HostAP - see my old posts) and a lot of unnecessary services that I had been playing with (samba and Apache server, Webmin) and that were using up some of the precious 32MB RAM. The machine had about 200MB free disk space (it's only a 1.2GB disk).

How did I install Woody? Well, I can't remember the details, but it wasn't that hard. I basically lifted the hard disk out of the libretto and shoved it in an old Tecra from the same era. I booted the Tecra from Woody install media and installed the base system on the HDD. I then shoved the HDD back in the libretto and completed the install. That's about it. The difficult bit was the X config and HostAP stuff I did later....

Anyway, I had a chew over my options, and decided to stick with Debian because, well, it rocks as a free O/S. I didn't want to do an upgrade though, as I have little system resources and wanted to do a lean and clean install of Sarge. What I did, therefore, was a network install, booting from the hard disk. I then just hacked LILO to give me a boot menu, rebooted and chose "newinstall".

What's cool is that I did this all with a Netgear PCMCIA Wireless card, and the new installer just let me join my wireless LAN and get on with it - the network install is going on over WiFi as I speak. All that fighting with HostAP is (hopefully) a thing of the past. :)

2005-06-15T12:17:00.000Z

MiniSlack - The project site of the MiniSlack linux distribution

2005-06-11T07:15:00.000Z

Building a Linux Virtual Server. This is not a cluster as I understand it, as it does not provide for a single instance of a service across multiple servers. It also (as described) has a single point of failure, but it is incredibly simple and is a pretty good load balancing solution. Can't see why anyone would use Windows NLB when you can do stuff like this on Linux :)

2005-06-07T06:45:00.000Z

Well, Apple might have gone intel, but at least Debian Sarge has been released to cheer me up a bit :)

2005-05-31T11:59:00.000Z

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

2005-05-27T15:52:00.000Z

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

2005-05-17T16:14:00.000Z

..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.

2005-05-17T15:49:00.000Z

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.

2005-05-16T21:16:00.000Z

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

2005-05-12T06:43:00.000Z

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.......

2005-05-09T17:36:00.000Z

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

2005-05-09T17:12:00.000Z

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

2005-05-06T06:38:00.000Z

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.

2005-05-05T10:50:00.000Z

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.......

2005-04-05T14:42:00.000Z

From Using apt-get through a Proxy:

True to the tradition of standardized variables, the one big thing you need to know to make this work is $http_proxy. $http_proxy is an environmental variable that is used by all sorts of well known programs, such as lynx and wget. The simplest way of taking advantage of this little wonder is to set or define it. In bash, we do it like this:

$ export http_proxy='http://server:port'

If your lucky enough to have a proper proxy setup, you might be able to pass the login and password via the URL and save yourself a step. The syntax is pretty straight forward:

$ export http_proxy='http://user:password@server:port'

Now that we've got that pesky variable squared away, we can move on to getting the proxy to recognize us as an authenticated user by logging in. Firing up lynx, after first checking to make sure our variable is properly set (echo $http_proxy), we try to hit an innocent site like Google. If all went well, we should be presented with the proxy page screaming for our user name and password, lest they send the fifth horsemen after us to gnaw on our shoulders. Enter in the required information and proceed as if everything were as normal as rain in the gutter, while opening another xterm.

The moment of truth has arrived, for if our amazing feats of hackery succeeded in the goals we set out to achieve, we will receive the gift from the gods, the holy deb files."

2005-04-05T12:43:00.000Z

SchoolTool - The SchoolTool Project

2005-03-29T19:19:00.000Z

The Tao of Mac - HOWTO/Set Up daapd on Fedora Linux. It's like this bloke is some kind of karmic twin/mentor for me or something - he is a Mac fanatic who also uses Linux, and this is exactly what I want to achieve.

2005-03-28T08:23:00.000Z

What's in Your Box? - an interesting (although not necessarily frequently updated) blog of links, including The Guide to a Linux iTunes Server.
Looks very much like I can keep a copy of my music library on my Linux server and have it available to every other machine over iTunes rendezvous. More here and at the official daapd page.
Tasty.

2005-03-25T17:32:00.000Z

Some tasty Linux Wallpaper - note links on the left for categories.

2005-03-25T09:55:00.000Z

Nagios is an open source network and systems monitoring tool. You'll probably also want some plugins, some mates in the community and also PerfParse to store and analyse the collected data.
This might take me a while to get running.......

2005-03-10T11:42:00.000Z

Nvu - The Complete Web Authoring System for Linux, Macintosh. Basically, the reincarnation of Mozilla Composer, I think.

2005-03-09T12:44:00.000Z

Puppy Linux - runs of a bootable multi-session CD so you can save files if you boot offa CDRW drive. Nice.

2005-03-07T22:16:00.000Z

How To Set Up A Debian Linux WebCam Server Using a USB Web Cam. Another thing I always meant to look into.......

2005-02-20T18:42:00.000Z

ShirtPocket: Sharp Zaurus SL-C860/SL-C3000. Beautiful. If only it would play ball with iSync........

2004-12-22T22:37:00.000Z

Some links on USB palm devices and Ubuntu / Linux here and here.

2004-12-22T16:16:00.000Z

Ubuntu artwork; here and here.

2004-12-20T14:55:00.000Z

(:^tuxs.org) 10 things to do with a live linux cd

2004-12-20T14:54:00.000Z

Codeweavers CrossOver Office now offers support for iTunes on Linux (although CD burning doesn't work).
The alternative is the new Mindawn service, but I am a major user of iTunes on my Macs :) - I wonder if sharing will work?.......

2004-12-20T08:41:00.000Z

So, I've been playing with Ubuntu on an old Compaq Presario 305 laptop. This is an old "sub-notebook" featuring a Celeron 333MHz CPU and 128MB RAM. Mine has a 6GB HDD. The floppy and CD-ROM drives are in a "Mobile Expansion Unit", which is a base that doubles the thickness of the notebook, but can be removed when not in use.
I just wanted to summarise my experience here:
First I downloaded the iso image for Ubuntu "Warty Warthog" and burned it to a CD.
Next, I plugged the Presario into it's base "Mobile Expansion Unit" and connected mains power.
Then, I inserted a NetGear WG511 wireless PCMCIA 802.11g card in the single PCMCIA slot.
Next, I booted the laptop from the Ubuntu CD.
The Ubuntu text-based installer then ran. This is from memory, so it's not a "howto", but the installer asked for normal, simple information such as hostname, user information, time, date, regional settings and then, to my great surprise and pleasure, the ESSID and WEP key for my wireless network! :)
Ubuntu then proceeded to install, and seemed to use the wireless connection to retrieve some packages.
Following the install process (about half an hour to 45 minutes, I'd say), an "install complete" message appeared, and when I clicked "OK", Ubuntu loaded to the GDM login screen!
When I then logged in, it became apparent that sound was working, as I was greeted with the lovely Ubuntu login chime.
This (in my experience) is a fantastic result with Linux on a notebook - I have always had to fight with something in the past, but Ubuntu got it almost all right automatically. Also, the Gnome UI is well done - simple, attractive and effective. It works fine on this old notebook (although I am restricted to 800x600 by the old TFT).

Anyway, the only issues I had were that the battery meter didn't work, and the laptop did not actually power down on shutdown - I was just left at the command line with the "Power Down" message and had to hit the button myself.
This turned out to be no great shakes to fix - to get both working, I just followed bsherman's forum advice and disabled ACPI (which wasn't loading anyway) and enabled APM, as follows:

Here is a much simpler way to switch to using APM.

Edit your boot config using this command:
sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

You'll want to change the kernel line to add the items in red.
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8.1-3-386 root=/dev/hda4 ro quiet splash acpi=off noacpi

In order to make sure this change propegates to future kernel upgrades, you'll also want to edit the default lines:
## You can have ONLY one nonaltoptions line
# nonaltoptions=quiet splash acpi=off noacpi

CTRL-X to save, and your boot config is updated.
One last thing, ensure you load the apm module.

sudo nano /etc/modules

Simple add a new line with the module name "apm":

psmouse
mousedev
ide-cd
ide-disk
ide-generic
apm

Reboot, and you're running APM, not ACPI.

So, I now have a Presario 305 running Ubuntu :)

As another note, when I attached my Fuji digital camera via USB, Ubuntu recognised that there were pictures on the attached device and asked if I wanted to import them - another gold star for Ubuntu!

Also, note that Ubuntu doesn't offer root login anywhere - you are not even prompted for a root password at any point IIRC. This is a good thing - root access is available via sudo or a special system utility in the GUI which is a root terminal. In order to open the root termiinal or to perform other O/S management tasks, you are prompted for your password. This is very much like Mac OS X, and I think it's a fine way to manage things in a desktop environment that might be used by non-geeks.

Finally, I use Debian on other machines, and the traditional apt-get commands work just fine for system updates.

All in all, I would have to say that Ubuntu is the most user-friendly Linux distro I have tried. I am very impressed with the installation and hardware detection, the GUI is clean and manageable (even for non-techies, I would say), and best of all, it's based on Debian and is free. I will certainly be using Ubuntu whenever I need a Linux desktop/workstation from now on - full marks!

2004-12-19T22:13:00.000Z

Ubuntu Linux Forums - Using APM instead of ACPI? - this sorted me out on my old Presario 305, as the battery meter wasn't working.

2004-12-17T14:37:00.000Z

Matthew Revell: Automatic shutdown in Ubuntu - top tip.
Ubuntu still rocks, though.

2004-12-16T23:51:00.000Z

Ubuntu Linux Forums - Disable trackpad tapping.
I gotta tell ya though - this is my only complaint about Ubuntu on my old laptop. All hardware, including wireless, was detected and configured beautifully. And it's based on Debian.
In short, Ubuntu rocks!!.

2004-11-30T14:19:00.000Z

bittorrent RPM for Fedora Core 3

2004-11-29T17:49:00.000Z

Apparently, using a recent version, it is possible to use vnc to remote the "console" desktop (display:0) on Linux, using RealVNC - Native X display support.

2004-11-13T14:51:00.000Z

Ubuntu Linux - the new kid on the Open Source block, apparently.

2004-11-12T07:47:00.000Z

Red Hat/Fedora X Terminal Server - actually, it's not, but it is a very useful little howto on using XDMCP with Fedora/Red Hat.

2004-11-01T14:43:00.000Z

LinuxISO.org - - A place to learn about, download, and discuss Linux.

2004-10-28T16:05:00.000Z

ATI Linux driver packages for Debian

2004-10-28T16:04:00.000Z

Linux Format :: - a tip for installing VMWare on Mandrake 10.1.

2004-10-28T16:01:00.000Z

Linux Format :: - a tip for installing VMWare on Mandrake 10.1.

2004-10-25T20:54:00.000Z

H/W detection in Debian ? - the answer is discover, it seems.......