Archive for the 'Crap' Category

So thanks to a friend’s awesomeness, I have access to a proper Linux VM kicking it in a real datacenter! This means I can finally move the content off of my home server!

So Bung (the VM) will now serve my static content for the various sites I host, and Pants (local server) will be for services. This should simplify a lot of things, and give me a bit more experience with a) Ubuntu as a server and b) running a VM server.

In addition to switching up hosts, I’m also switching up HTTPD services. I’ve dealt exclusively with Apache (1.3 and 2) in the past. The same friend that is providing the VM also convinced me to give Nginx (wiki.nginx.org) a shot. It’s taken quite a bit of getting used to, but it does seem to be crazy fast, and the config gets a lot easier as you go along.

I have already migrated the sites under the scummbox.org umbrella, and am just rsync-ing the content for the other domains that I host. Hopefully the remainder of the sites will be relocated by this weekend!

This is being bashed out just minutes after cutting over from Old Pants (now Net) to New Pants (ex Net.)

The cutover was smooth-ish… aside from remote SSH access dying (thank god for VPN logins) and Apache forgetting it had PHP (a quick PHP recompile fixed that.) We’ll see if anything else has suffered during the move.

A lot of things have been re-arranged, due to the default set up of Apache 2.2. If you come across a link that doesn’t work, let me know… I’ll do my best to point you to the new link, or fix the issue.

This entry is being written on the brand new pre-prod scummbox! Weird to write a blog post that could not see the light of day for potential months!

As of yesterday, I decided that pants, the existing scummbox, is getting long in the tooth. It’s an old Celeron 333 maching that I got for free from a company that was throwing a tonne of them out. It lived a hard life before I got it, and it’s lived a harder life since then.

Pants has had cats chew on its power cables, rained on, dropped, had catastrophic power failures and still runs tickity-boo 99% of the time. But that 1% is out there, and I don’t want to get burned.

So I’ve made New Pants! New Pants is running much newer hardware (AMD X2 processor, 2gb of ram) and with a lot more storage (1TiB vs 40GiB) in a well-ventilated case. There has also been a complete OS changeover from the old FreeBSD 5.4 to a current version of Gentoo Linux.

As I type, I’m configuring mail services and copying over some test sites to see how things deal with my Apache/PHP/MySQL installs. WordPress has dealt well with the change, and theoretically mail delivery and webmail are running, too!

The problem will be identifying all the different processes running on Pants, and replicating them on the new machine. Already Apache 2 has changed how I store sites and configure virtual servers… but I’m not expecting it all to be smooth sailing.

Well, another post that no one will see once this build is closer to finished!

Some back story: About two weeks ago, one of my cats stepped on my surge suppressor power switch, and killed power to my machines (the suppressors are now zip-tied to my desk out of reach.) The only machine that was effected was my main Linux desktop (of course) which would no longer boot reliably. Seeing this as a chance to get rid of the last IDE drive in that system, I went out and got a new drive and installed it. Now as I have already posted, I have been with Gentoo for a year. Not one to rest on my laurels and let the Ubuntu sensation pass me by, I decided to install that on the desktop.

So after using Ubuntu for a week, I decided I didn’t like the coddling it does. What do you mean I can’t accidentally uninstall Coreutils and have to spend 4 frenzied hours trying to download and extract a version with no “advanced” tools such as ls and rm? I can’t trust anything that doesn’t boot to the command line prior to a GUI (Thus my current problems with Windows and OSX.)

So, in the spirit of “This works, but not to my satisfaction”, I nuked my Ubuntu install and put Gentoo back on the machine.

Ahh, that’s better.

Immediately I run into package blocks (HOORAY! I missed you, blocked packages!) between coldplug and udev. This is a known issue with older installs (2006.1, from the scrawl on the disc. The current install version of Gentoo is 2007.0) upgrading to the newest packages. Udev now has coldplug included (Linux Primer: Udev dynamically creates your /dev directory… the directory where all your raw devices are kept. Hard drive information, sound card information, etc. It’s much better than the old way. Coldplug checks for devices that cannot be changed while the computer is running… PCI cards and the like… and makes them useable by the linux system.) That paragraph got huge. Time for a new one.

So Coldplug is blocking Udev. No worries. I unmerge (uninstall) coldplug, and do the udev upgrade. Around the same time I change my network settings so that I have a static IP from my router, but it’s not taking. So, reboot. Once the system comes back up, I have to modprobe forcedeth (basically my NIC driver) before I can run /etc/init.d/net.eth0 start (the start-up script for my network card.) It didn’t twig in my head that because of removing coldplug and not running revdep-rebuild (basically recompiles any packages dependent on changed/removed components) to make sure everything used the new Udev, I might have some issues with services.

Prior to leaving to work this morning, I got a pretty big package upgrade going and strolled out the door thinking all is fine. Upon getting to work this morning, though, I find that ssh isn’t running. Oh woe is me!! A new Linux system, and I can’t even tinker with it remotely? Maddening! I meant to install my graphics card drivers and my current favorite Xwindows Manager whilst here (yes, everything I did prior was from a command line.) Nothing chafes me more than my own stupidity in these situations.

So I’ll be pissed about that for a good while

First, an aside: Today I am a real Blogger. I am posting this from a coffee shop in Toronto!

January 10th (or thereabouts) marks the 1 year anniversary of me getting bored with a Windows XP workstation and installing Linux for the first time in many years. Since then I’ve added a wee Ubuntu box and a PowerMac G4 running OS X Leopard (a topic for a different post) to my managre,

I usually leave my computer on over night, for seeding purposes. When I went to wake it up this morning, I noticed that I had no keyboard activity. No num lock, ctrl+alt+backspace (Kills the X Windows session) wasn’t working… nor was ctrl+alt+F12 (the DMESG view). The monitor came on to a black screen (power saving mode.) The thing was hung. My keyboard has an LCD built into it, which shows the system time. It was stopped at 3:15 AM. So, I reboot.

On reboot I see that there are several major errors: Udev wasn’t loading properly, the System Clock cannot be accessed, ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) won’t load, nor will my network card. Crap.

What did I do last night? I ran a deep system update based on a new portage listing. What was updated? Umm… my Vorbis libraries… oh, the Linux Kernel Headers. Well, that might have something to do with it. So, genkernel -all, wait 30 minutes, reboot… success! I don’t know if the kernel rebuild was strictly necessary, but it seems to have done the trick.

Going through the logs from last night, all I can see is the cron agent running at 3:00, and then some NTFS checks happening. Nothing that *should* have caused a major freak out. We’ll see how things go tonight.

*Update*

After posting on the Gentoo forums, it turns out the issue had to do with my NTFS driver and my localization settings. Two commands and my system hasn’t seized in days!

First things first. man emerge. Seriously. You’ll be using it a *lot*
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2006 was a topsy-turvy year… I went from XP installs to Vista installs then back to XP installs… but I was feeling very *meh* towards my computer. It was boring. No umph.

So a new year has started, and a friend managed to get me interested in Desktop Linux again. I’ve run a couple day-to-day Linux installs, but they never lasted for one reason or another. The last one was probably in the very early 2000′s.
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For people that are using the Mozilla Bon Echo alpha releases… Forcing Firefox Extensions to Work on Bon Echo

So I havn’t posted since the end of August. Yikes!

Nothing much has occured on the Scummbox front. I need to get more hard drive space for it pretty damn quick, but that’s about it. Scummbox is officially hosting 5 domain names, with a 6th to come (moving the old Analognoise site over for shits and giggles.)

I havn’t had any Workstation issues as of late, either. I had a brush with a crippling World Of Warcraft addiction, and a re-aquantance with City Of Heroes. I really need to get a new CPU/Motherboard/RAM for that system… She’s struggling.

I definatly need to do something neat on scummbox soon.