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Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
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8:18 pm - how to look up you local machine's external IP address (not 127.0.0.1)
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I needed to write some code to find out my local machine's IP address. I wanted to tell another machine my IP address so that other machine could open a socket connection back to my machine. A little googling turned up some sample code which works on both Linux and Mac OS X.
Also I fiddled around with that code and condensed it down a bit.
current mood: educated
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, February 15th, 2009
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8:17 am - new Debian release!
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A new version of Debian stable has been released! My firewall machine, entropy, is currently running the "old" Debian stable (etch). Sometime soon I'll update to the new stable release, Debian 5.0 Lenny.
Just for reference, here is how I will update:
edit /etc/apt/sources.list, change all occurrences of etch to lenny, then run these commands as root:
aptitude update
aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
aptitude full-upgrade
when it is done, then I'll have to reboot to start using the new kernel. It will be interesting to see how long the upgrade takes.
Entropy is an HP Vectra business workstation with a 90MHz pentium (i586!), 128MB of RAM, and a 4GB hard drive. The RAM and hard drive sizes would have been incredible when the computer was new; I slowly increased them over time as they got cheap. Entropy would have shipped with 8 or 16MB of RAM, and possibly a 1GB hard drive. I acquired the machine in 1999 for $100. I wanted a second machine so I could try out connecting two machines together via ethernet. I used it as a development workstation for a brief period! I believe it would have been new around 1994. I hope to retired it sometime this spring. My goal is to get a brand new, energy efficient machine so I can run one machine constantly instead of the 3 or 4 I run now.
current mood: upgradeable
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| Friday, February 6th, 2009
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9:53 pm - gnome programs and gnome so far
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I've been looking for some programs to restore functionality I lost when I left kde 3.5.
glipper is an ok clipboard history application. although each entry only gets 99 characters.
liferea is almost as good an RSS Reader as akregator-kde3 (and MUCH better than akregator-kde4).
evolution is a mixed bag. it's great for contacts, calendars, and imap, but LDAP won't work, so no corporate address book, which is going to be a problem. I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with that yet, but I suspect I'll end up using thunderbird and evolution simultaneously (after disabling thunderbird's calendar completely)
one thing that has been nice about being in gnome is firefox! it's nice to click on a link in an email again and having it open, instead of having to copy it from thunderbird and paste it in konqueror. plus when I want to use google maps, well, I already have firefox open instead of having to open firefox first.
another nice thing in gnome: the desktop in general is snappy and responsive. kde4 feels slushy by comparison (at least on my hardware). I can't really compare to kde 3.5 any more, I've been running kde4 too long. but gnome feels more responsive than kde4.
so the experiment continues. Things I still need to investigate:
A way to add feeds to liferea from firefox like I used to be able to do with konqueror and akregator. (this is really a pretty minor, rare requirement, but it was one of the things that irked me about kde4 when it mysteriously went missing, both with 'updated from 3.5' configs, and with fresh empty configs)
random wallpaper applet so the background changes periodically from my huge pool of pictures
photo app for doing red-eye correction and possibly photo managing, to replace digikam
ldap lookups in evolution is still a sore spot.
my desktop at work has an additional problem; a couple keyboard mappings i put in don't work, and I'm not sure why yet.
the strangest thing about gnome are the notifications. the new email and calendar alarms are perfect. they look similar to the ones from outlook (but better) but don't interrupt your typing; so you see them, but you can keep typing on what you were doing with no interruption. that part is good. the bad part is the notifications from pidgin are too subtle; just a flashing icon on the panel, no pop-up like from evolution, so it's easy to not even see it. there may be some options though, I haven't looked yet.
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| Thursday, February 5th, 2009
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11:04 pm - gnome rss reader: liferea
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the first one I tried, liferea, has most of the good points from the kde 3.5 akregator: feeds with unread articles stand out with bold text, and the number of unread articles is tucked up next to the title. if there are no unread articles, there is no number. simple yet effective and readable at a glance.
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9:17 pm - kde vs. gnome
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I can't believe I'm typing this.
I'm logged in with gnome as my desktop.
I'm going to use it on all my computers for the next few days or a week and see how it goes.
KDE4 bothers me this much.
KDE4 keeps getting better, but I believe it will take at least another year to reach the polish of KDE 3.5. and I'm finding that in ubuntu, gnome is actually MORE polished than my beloved KDE 3.5!
A big draw, and pleasant surprise, has been evolution. last time I tried evolution, it sucked. that was about 5 years ago. These days I've been whining that there are no good Linux GUI email clients. Kmail sucks, in 3.5 or 4.0, its performance with IMAP is abysmal. Thunderbird is fast, but will not cache IMAP messages (plus its calendar sucks, with obnoxious notifications that are hard to dismiss). Evolution seems willing to cache IMAP emails, runs fast, and the calendar seems to work great (at least, I was able to import my calendar files seamlessly; the true test will come at work when I try to sync my work appointments to it).
Everything I've tried in gnome so far seems very smooth, polished, and lightning fast; this is on my old old workstation at home, where kde 3.5 runs acceptably but with flickery redraws, and kde4 is a tick slower than that.
the gnome clock even kicks kde's clock's ass! the gnome folks took all the ideas from the kde clock, improved on them, and ran with it. one click on the gnome clock gives me a current calendar, a list of appointments for the day, and current time and temperature in as many cities as I want.
and there is even a memory usage gauge on my gnome panel, something I was having trouble finding in kde4.
still some questions I need to answer: does gnome's file manager work as well as konqueror or dolphin? does it support ssh, like the fish IOslave in kde? and I need a new RSS Reader for the gnome desktop to replace akregator. and then there is digikam, with the best red-eye correction I have yet found; I wonder if g-spot or f-spot or whatever the gnome photo collection program is called can match that. although, there is of course no reason why I can't run digikam on my spiffy new (possibly) gnome desktop.
I thought I would have trouble replacing kdepim (kmail, korganizer, and kaddressbook) but evolution seems to handily take care of that.
we shall see.
current mood: reluctant
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| Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
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12:13 pm - CVS and Subversion
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Let me start off by saying that CVS and Subversion are both outdated systems that no one in their right mind should use for a new project. (If you are starting a new project, I would recommend managing your source code with Mercurial).
Unfortunately, I have in the past been forced to use CVS, and I am now forced to use Subversion. I had hoped that Subversion would truly be an upgrade over CVS, since Subversion promises merge tracking.
What I have learned is that Subversion has about as many quirks as CVS, and of course they are different quirks. Today I want to talk about a big one I ran into.
The canonical way to handle branching in Subversion (svn) is to copy the entire module tree to a directory named for the branch. Then multiple commits can be done on the branch. if commits are done on trunk, and you want to get those changes on your branch, you can ask svn to merge those changes onto your branch. svn records information about what commits were merged to the branch in svn properties, which are simply metadata attached to the files. svn uses the data stored in the properties to enable you to merge trunk into your branch at will, over and over again. so far so good, and this is an improvement over CVS, where you have to track the merge info manually (usually by lots of tagging and hoping everyone on the project knows what they are doing; I used the alternative method of tracking CVS changes in mercurial, and doing merges in mercurial instead of CVS).
Eventually when you are ready to merge the branch back to trunk, you run svn merge with the --reintegrate flag, and svn then knows how to handle the stuff that was already merged to the branch.
The first time I tried this though, I was confronted with a gnarly error message:
svn: Cannot reintegrate from 'url://feature-branch' yet:
Some revisions have been merged under it that have not been merged
into the reintegration target; merge them first, then retry.
eh? this was right after I had merged everything from trunk onto the branch again! Where were these mysterious unmerged revisions coming from? This was pretty scary, I thought I was doing everything right, yet it seemed I obviously must not understand svn at all yet.
google of course turned up The Answer. I had carelessly renamed a file on the branch, creating spurious mergeinfo as a side effect; silly me! I had to delete the svn:mergeinfo property on the new file, then svn "graciously" allowed me to merge my branch to trunk. Subversion is indeed a truly awe-inspiring and confidence-building tool!
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| Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
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4:21 pm - controlling iTunes via iPhone
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I've gotten in the habit of playing music on my big stereo via iTunes running on my Mac.
A handy remote control for this is the Apple-created iPhone app called "Remote". it looks like an ipod on your phone, but it's controlling an iTunes running on a Mac over the network.
It works well enough, but not perfectly. Lag time between waking up the iPhone and being able to control iTunes is in the neigborhood of 5 seconds, which is an eternity when you're used to instant digital gratification.
The lag has two components: waiting for the iphone to connect to the wi-fi, and then waiting for the Remote app to connect to iTunes.
I discovered a fix for the first! I was letting my iPhone configure itself dynamically via DHCP. it was taking at least 3 and sometimes 4 whole seconds to get on the wireless network.
On a whim, I set it to use a static IP address for my home wireless. Next time I woke the phone up, the wi-fi connection happened instantaneously!
So now I'm only left waiting for 1 to 2 seconds for Remote to connect to iTunes; much better than the full 5 seconds it took before.
I usually turn wi-fi off on my iPhone when I leave home; I haven't found a compelling enough reason to need the extra bandwidth (on the off chance I can find a free or AT&T hotspot) to justify the accelerated battery drain. I also keep bluetooth off all the time since I don't have any bluetooth devices or cars (yet!)
current mood: statically addressed
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| Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
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7:23 pm - spotlight in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and "System Files"
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I would like to switch away from using quicksilver to using spotlight for all my searching; it will be simpler to use one interface instead of two. QuickSilver does quite a few things that spotlight will not do (and vice versa). but most of the things I want to do are covered by spotlight, with one notable and nearly fatal exception: searching for saved Terminal.app session files.
I ssh to other machines often, and I set up a saved terminal session for each machine. I'm used to then searching for the name of the session in quicksilver to run it without using the mouse.
Spotlight in Leopard is set up by default to leave out what it likes to call "System files", i.e., anything in ~/Library (and probably in /Library too). and of course saved Terminal.app session files live in ~/Library/Application Support/Terminal.
After much gnashing of teeth, I think I've hit upon a solution, which I'll describe in more detail after I test it some more. But the start of my path to the solution was definitely this article: http://db.tidbits.com/article/9283
short version is I think fiddling with the myriad dropdowns in the Spotlight Finder window has caused Spotlight to finally realize that I always want to include "System files" in my spotlight searches.
current mood: spotlighted
current music: "West End Girls", Pet Shop Boys
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7:16 pm - freeing up itunes songs (removing fairplay DRM)
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I unfortunately have some songs I bought from the itunes music store using the FairPlay DRM. I know, I know, that was a mistake. well now I'm stuck with about 55 songs I can't play in linux, and I have to worry about making sure I don't run out of the 5 auths for my macs (which is a much more serious and likely scenario)
some songs can be 'upgraded' for 30 cents to a non-drm version (and a higher sampling rate too). follow this link on your mac:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/iTunesPlusPage
for me, only 1 out of those 55 songs was available for upgrade though.
so now I'm going to have to go through by hand, burn them all out to CDs as cd audio, then re-rip them, then add back in the metadata (artist, song title, my rating, etc). and accept the loss in quality from being encoded twice. blech.
needless to say I won't be buying any more of the tracks with DRM on them.
P.S., there used to be programs (QTFairUse was one of them) that would allow you to strip the DRM off the songs. but then Apple sent the guys who wrote it and distributed it some Cease and Desist orders, so now that's not available any more.
current mood: money wasted
current music: "Precious", by Depeche Mode
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7:05 pm - getting full screen mode to work on external monitor in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
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I've been trying to display stuff in full screen mode from my mac on my television which accepts VGA input.
After plugging in the cable, going through setting up the display in system preferences, I was easily able to make the TV be a second screen sitting next to my macbook's built in lcd. So then I moved a preview.app window over to the television (drug it over using the mouse). I hit the slideshow button, expecting it to go to full screen mode on the tv.
But instead it went to fullscreen mode on the built-in LCD, and started showing the slideshow there, which was quite disappointing.
after some fiddling around, I tried moving the menu bar to the television. (in System Preferences, in "Displays", go to the "Arrangement" tab, and there you can drag the menu bar to the external display).
it turns out it doesn't matter which screen the app is on; when it goes to fullscreen mode, it will display on whichever display has the menu bar.
I tried this in preview.app and also in Front Row. I assume the same behavior would happen in iPhoto too.
current mood: solved
current music: "Wake Up", Mad Season
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| Monday, November 24th, 2008
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1:50 pm - getting some critical apps on leopard, using fink
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I'm running Mac OS X version 10.5 (leopard), and I've install xcode 3.1.
I need gnumeric and gnucash, which I use to track my finances. The current stable rsync version of fink contains gnumeric 1.8.1-3 and gnucash 2.2.5-52, both of which are close enough to the versions I have in Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Intrepid Ibex to be useable.
gnumeric and its dependencies compiled and installed fine.
the gnucash2 package, however, failed building some dependent library. here's the errors I got:
/usr/X11/lib/libXdamage.1.1.0.dylib: No such file or directory
libpixman-1.0.10.0.dylib: No such file or directory
and there was additional error about libcairo too.
I used the command-line interface to spotlight to find them:
mdfind libpixman
mdfind libcairo
and ended up using these commands to create some symbolic links (3 really long lines):
sudo ln -s /usr/X11/lib/libXdamage.1.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libXdamage.1.1.0.dylib
sudo ln -s /usr/X11/lib/libpixman-1.0.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libpixman-1.0.10.0.dylib
sudo ln -s /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk/usr/X11/lib/libcairo.2.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libcairo.2.17.5.dylib
it will probably break next time I update xcode but it should work for now.
current mood: accomplished
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, December 6th, 2007
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7:34 pm - replacing aging hardware
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I bought a new cablemodem. Each morning this week, the
cablemodem was down until lunch time. last night it went down too. today it
never came back on. From what I hear, they actually wear out slowly and
sporadically... they will just start getting flakey, rather than die all at
once. The old cablemodem was still flashing orange lights when I unplugged it and put the new one in. it took a couple minutes for the new one to get all
green lights, then at first it handed me a private IP address. so I called the
cable company (Mediacom) and they had to register the new cablemodem's MAC address. It even seems faster than the old one. here's the speed:
Speed Test #41331191 by dslreports.com
Run: 2007-12-06 19:15:35 EST
Download: 7386 (Kbps)
Upload: 478 (Kbps)
In kilobytes per second: 901.6 down 58.4 up
Tested by server: 54 java
User: 2 @ dslreports.com
User's DNS: mchsi.com
Compared to the average of 158 tests from mchsi.com:
* download is 65% better
current mood: connected
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, November 29th, 2007
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10:00 pm - network fun
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I was doing stuff on my computer tonight at home, then I realized I had
updated my calendar at work but hadn't pushed the changes to the server (I
did a git commit, but not a git push, I was in a hurry to leave to pick up
aiden from school).
no prob, I thought, I'll just log in to the vpn, get on my computer at work (fission), and push the changes.
got on the vpn, but fission was timing out on ssh, and wouldn't answer a
ping. eh?
then I started getting nervous, because I actually got a lot of work done
today, and hadn't pushed those patches anywhere else (not even to my
laptop). again, I was in a hurry to get out.
looked on the backup server: fission got backed up at 9am today, but all backups for
fission failed after that. (at 11, and 2, and 5pm)
brief moment of panic, thinking I had lost a day's work (thinking the
worst, that fission's hard drive had died)!
then I thought through it a bit more, and theorized that sometime between
9am and the next backup at 11am, fission got a new ip address from the
dhcp server. I thought of this theory, because I knew I had been using the machine all day during the times the backups failed.
ok, I thought, there's only 256 possibilities, I can start sshing. but I
didn't even try that.
my next thought was nmap. a quick google search, and then I did this:
sudo nmap -O x.x.x.0/24 > /work/tmp/list
let it run for a while, it was pretty slow. what it gave me was a list of
every machine, what services they were running, and a best guess of the OS
type. at first I just started looking for linux 2.6.X, but then thought
better of it and starting trying all machines which were providing ssh.
finally found fission at 202!! here's the output nmap gave me for it. I'm
not sure how in the world it came up with the host name even! I didn't
even notice that until afterwards. I'm not sure what some of those
services are either. but oh well, I got logged in to fission and now won't
have to lose a day's work or drive in to the office tomorrow, or tell
someone how to switch the keyboard back to qwerty to check it for me. :)
Interesting ports on fission.office.tmcs (x.x.x.202):
Not shown: 1687 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
53/tcp open domain
111/tcp open rpcbind
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
873/tcp open rsync
902/tcp open iss-realsecure-sensor
2049/tcp open nfs
3128/tcp open squid-http
6667/tcp filtered irc
No exact OS matches for host (If you know what OS is running on it, see
http://insecure.org/nmap/submit/ ).
TCP/IP fingerprint:
OS:SCAN(V=4.20%D=11/29%OT=22%CT=1%CU=39139%PV=N%DS=6%G=Y%TM=474F91EB%P=i686
OS:-pc-linux-gnu)SEQ(SP=D7%GCD=1%ISR=F0%TI=Z%TS=8)SEQ(SP=E4%GCD=1%ISR=F1%TI
OS:=Z%II=I%TS=8)SEQ(SP=E0%GCD=1%ISR=F1%TI=Z%II=I%TS=8)SEQ(SP=E4%GCD=1%ISR=F
OS:0%TI=Z%II=I%TS=8)SEQ(SP=DC%GCD=1%ISR=EF%TI=Z%II=I%TS=8)OPS(O1=M5B4ST11NW
OS:7%O2=M5B4ST11NW7%O3=M5B4NNT11NW7%O4=M5B4ST11NW7%O5=M5B4ST11NW7%O6=M5B4ST
OS:11)WIN(W1=16A0%W2=16A0%W3=16A0%W4=16A0%W5=16A0%W6=16A0)ECN(R=Y%DF=Y%T=40
OS:%W=16D0%O=M5B4NNSNW7%CC=N%Q=)T1(R=Y%DF=Y%T=40%S=O%A=S+%F=AS%RD=0%Q=)T2(R
OS:=N)T3(R=Y%DF=Y%T=40%W=16A0%S=O%A=S+%F=AS%O=M5B4ST11NW7%RD=0%Q=)T4(R=Y%DF
OS:=Y%T=40%W=0%S=A%A=Z%F=R%O=%RD=0%Q=)T5(R=Y%DF=Y%T=40%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=
OS:%RD=0%Q=)T6(R=Y%DF=Y%T=40%W=0%S=A%A=Z%F=R%O=%RD=0%Q=)T7(R=Y%DF=Y%T=40%W=
OS:0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=)U1(R=Y%DF=N%T=40%TOS=0%IPL=164%UN=0%RIPL=G%RI
OS:D=G%RIPCK=G%RUCK=G%RUL=G%RUD=G)IE(R=Y%DFI=N%T=40%TOSI=Z%CD=S%SI=S%DLI=S)
current mood:  relieved
current music: nine inch nails - reptile
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
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9:17 am - more re-installs?
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now I'm thinking about re-building my server too, after the successes with my workstation and laptop. for this one, I would get a new, big hard drive, and do the install on it, then copy all the files over. first step will be to shop for hard drives; they are cheap now, but I hope they still make the kind I need for my server, which is a turn of the century model.
current mood: reckless
current music: Van Halen
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, November 26th, 2007
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8:27 pm - desk
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I finally did something I've been meaning to do for years.... my computer desk has a shelf on it to put the monitor on. which means a person sitting at the desk is looking up at the monitor, rather than slightly down. which meant I couldn't sit at the desk for more than 10 minutes. Tonight I spent an hour and half, moving the monitor, re-routing a dozen cables, and taking the shelf off. the desk is now so much better it's unbelieveable. not perfect, but better. a little chair adjustment helped even more. I still think I have issues with this chair though; the keyboard feels too far away from me still. I might try taking the keyboard tray off the bottom of the desk (I just have a power strip there, which I think can be relocated)
current mood: comfortable
current music: Melissa Etheridge - I Will Never Be the Same
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, November 11th, 2007
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6:07 pm - gutsy mobile
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I decided to go ahead and do a fresh install of kubuntu gutsy gibbon on my work laptop too. the main motivation was to utilize the disk space better. I wanted to eliminate some little or not-at-all used partitions, and I was almost out of space in my /work partition.
this install went almost as smooth as on Jupiter, but the laptop has a lot more software on it and a lot more requirements. I think I have everything done now, and I'm glad I did.
disk usage before:
Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
8.0G 5.8G 2.3G 72% /
4.0G 3.2G 861M 80% /home
1.0G 745M 280M 73% /tmp
13G 13G 505M 97% /data
16G 14G 2.7G 84% /work
5.0G 2.8G 2.3G 55% /cache
after:
Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
8.5G 4.9G 3.7G 57% /
23G 16G 6.9G 70% /home
228M 6.1M 211M 3% /boot
24G 14G 11G 56% /work
(any filesystems "missing" from the second list got integrated in somewhere else)
I went ahead and set dvorak as the default keyboard layout, so now I don't even have to log in with qwerty. the boot procedure is much simpler than before too, I have the same amount of security/crypto as before, but have to deal with about half a dozen less password prompts, since it prompts me for passphrases while booting instead of me logging in and then having to run sudo and some scripts to mount the encrypted partitions.
current mood: installed
current music: 1999; prince
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, November 9th, 2007
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7:40 pm - gutsy
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upon reading that the newest ubuntu release, gutsy gibbon, had support in the installer for encrypted partitions, I decided it was time to do an install from scratch on my workstation, Jupiter.
Jupiter was running fiesty fawn, and the whole disk was encrypted, but I practically had to roll my own initial ramdisk to get it set up, and I doubted that would make it through a dist-upgrade to gutsy without some serious intervention.
so I started the iso download of the "altenate" kubuntu cd, and started a backup going of /root, /etc, and /home. I needed the alternate cd because that was the one with LVM and crypto support.
install was easy of course. the boot splash screen welcomed me with a nice friendly passphrase prompt. all hardware was working upon boot.
started the restore going with the default account I had created, and started installing all the little odds and ends, like dockapps, mercurial, build-essential, etc.
copied my whole itunes library over from my ibook, and fired up amarok. it remembered all my playlists and stuff from before. hit play, and a dialog popped up saying it couldn't play mps. oh ya, damn patents. but there was also a button on that dialog to install mp3 support. so I pressed it, it prompted for my login password, then fired up adept, and about 10 seconds later told me mp3 support was installed, and that I needed to restart amarok. so I did that, and the music worked.
I still have to check in to videos and flash and the nvidia driver. for the nvidia driver, there's a new "restricted drivers" manager which I'm hoping will prove to be pretty easy.
and I have 3 dockapps I've customized that I need to install in /usr/local still. but all in all, this has been a pretty easy install.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, April 23rd, 2007
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9:21 pm - debian
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so debian etch is totally rocking.
It was a fun experience just reading the installation manual. The manual was impressive, I've not seen a work which conveyed so much information in so little words. Let me explain what I mean by that; I, as an expert Linux user, found the directions extremely helpful, easy to follow, with just the right amount of hints along the way. However, a Linux newb would be hopelessly lost. almost every phrase in the manual evoked whole volumes of knowledge, which it was assumed, nay, required, that the reader already possessed. :) No wonder Debian has the reputation of being elitist!
At the end of the directions, the manual stated I now had a running Debian system, albeit somewhat lean. I'll say! upon first boot, and logging in, I noticed the kernel was using about 5mb of ram for itself, and all running applications were taking up about 10mb! yep, only 15mb of ram for a full blown, non-embedded linux system. that was with a system logger and cron daemon running.
Then I installed the things I planned to actually use the computer for: a caching DNS server (bind9), ssh daemon, and typical stuff like zsh, screen, and darcs. The darcs install went ahead and pulled in exim, an SMTP server.
after I got screen going, with a couple zshs, and those other servers, ram usage ballooned all the way up to 22mb. :D Boy do I feel silly now, with the 1gb swap partition I created for this setup!
current mood: impressed
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
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2:54 pm - debian booted
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got debian etch booted on entropy. the only problem I had was I tried at first to use lilo. several years ago, grub wouldn't work on this machine, and I had to use lilo. Rembering that, I tried to install lilo from the get-go. but the complication of installing lilo into the second hard drive on the system so it would later boot as the first drive were a bit much. after 2 failed attempts (each one meaning I had to swap the drive into the other computer, changing a jumper at the same time), I gave up and tried grub again. it worked fine. :)
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, April 21st, 2007
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10:10 am - firewall machine
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My 90Mhz pentium named entropy has been my firewall machine (running iptables and a dns server) for quite a while now, without any trouble.
unfortunately, it's really been bothering me. why? because it was running Gentoo Linux, and had become un-upgradeable. it was at the point where nothing could be upgraded without first upgrading gcc, but the gcc build apparently requires 2gb of memory and/or swap space. Entropy has 128MB of ram, and a 4GB disk, not enough space to make a 2GB swap file without re-partitioning and doing a re-install. Also, this was my last remaining Gentoo system; I love the Gentoo philosophy, but have been less than pleased with the current implementation of the philosophy.
Notice the use of 'was' in the last paragraph.
I picked up a computer at a garage sale for $15. a 566MHz celeron (Pentium 3 era) with a 14GB disk. after a quick visit to the computorium's closet, it now has 192mb of ram, is running ubuntu dapper drake server, has 2 ethernet cards, is running bind9, iptables, and has taken over firewall duties from entropy. I've named this machine darkmatter. (Side note: when I was switching from one firewall machine to the other late one night, I thought of another really cool, astronomy-related hostname, but now I can't remember it for the life of me)
Anyway, this freed up entropy for some experimentation. I toyed with the idea of installing Damn Small Linux (DSL) or its big brother Damn Small Linux Not, but decided against them for two reasons: 1. they are small and fast, but targetted at the desktop, not the server, and 2. package management and upgrades seem to be a hybrid of their own specialized system and apt. I wanted a rock-solid, server oriented set up, with high confidence of future updates going smoothly.
so I'm trying out debian etch, newly marked as stable.
Entropy has no cd drive or usb ports, so install is a bit tricky. I briefly considered setting up boot floppies, but only for a few seconds. those days are way over.
I ended up pulling the hard drive out of Entropy, and putting it in my workstation, Jupiter, and now I'm following the instructions for installing from an existing Linux system.
It will be interesting to see how this works out.
current mood: experimental
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