Adventures in F,O, X, & 0

A little startup stirs into life

2011-12-20T22:02:00.002+13:00

I've been thinking about getting a little project underway for some time, and so there's now a grep101.com blog and a minimal landing page at www.grep101.com - fun stuff!

Postfix is fine, but I'm on a learning curve with mailman and the I nned to get some forum software setup - but the Next Big Thing is to get a decent design for the website.

Looking at www.designcrowd.com but of course it would also be fun to do-it-myself.

Hmmm, not sure how that would work!

Fancy logging

2011-07-10T15:33:00.002+12:00

Had some fun yesterday setting up a central syslog server, and getting 3 RHEL boxes to send to it.

Various third partied will have «root» on those three boxes, and security is a big thing with this install so... It Seemed Appropriate.

I've got logwatch on the three, but would like to setup Splunk (free) on this monitoring box. Looks pretty flash, so it might be a bit more to the liking of the suits.

As much as possible I'd like to send router, SAN and ESXi logs to it too, so there should be lots of data to mine.

I'm woefully ignorant on SNMP, but have set a custom community string on various boxes and pointed them to the monitoring machine. Nothing there is listening tho, so I need to do some more research...

Android Blogger client (Testing 123...)

2011-05-17T10:49:00.001+12:00

Installed and testing.... Like twitter and facebook, I suspect that doing this from the phone Just Makes Sense...

2011-05-06T18:30:00.004+12:00

Very nice post by Stéphane Graber got me started with LXC. Nice, this is going to be fun!

Steve's One Best Tip for the Web

2011-05-04T11:33:00.004+12:00

Most people browse the web using the default web browser that came with their machine.

However, using this, most people will see websites cluttered with advertisements, many flashing or blinking or in garish colour. Yuk.

Many of these advertisements will also be offering to “Scan your machine for viruses”, or even saying “You are infected!!” – and you, or anyone using your machine, clicks on one of these links then you are very likely to end with some type of “malware” (a virus, trojan, rootkit, keylogger or whatever).

Bad, bad stuff. So, what is the answer?

THE ANSWER = Adblock Plus + Firefox

Here’s what you need to do:

Download Firefox from http://getfirefox.com/

Install Firefox, and say YES when prompted to “Make Firefox your default browser”

Import all your old settings and Favourites via File, Import. Your “favourites” become Firefox “bookmarks”

Install Adblock Plus by: Tools, Add-ons, Get Add-ons and search for “Adblock”. Select “Adblock Plus” – the icon is a stop sign with “ABP”

You will be prompted to choose/confirm a Subscription. It is essential that you do this to make sure that Ablock Plus keeps up-to-date. The default subscription will normally be “EasyList (USA)”. Confirm this and restart Firefox when prompted. There will now be a red ABP “stop sign” at the top right or bottom left of your browser window to show that you’re protected

Enjoy your much saner and safer browsing experience!

Occasionally you will find that you have to turn off Adblock Plus to view a site, or a video. Only do this for sites you trust, and ensure that you turn in off just for that site – do this: Click on the Red ABP “stop sign” in your browser window, and choose “Disable of this page only”, or perhaps “Disable on www.mybank.com”, but NOT “Disable everywhere”. The “stop sign” will now be grey from that page, and advertisements will be displayed.

Notes for nitpickers:

Chrome and Chromium from Google are also good browser choices, and Adblock Plus can be installed (under Tools, Extensions)

Adblock Plus for isn’t available for either Opera or Internet Explorer, and while there are “similar” addons for these browsers they are rubbish by comparison

Internet Explorer was extremely unsafe in earlier versions. If you really need to use for some reason, then at least make sure you run version 8 or higher

Yes, antivirus software is probably also a good idea

ARM-based servers make sense for me...

2011-03-13T13:25:00.007+13:00

There are a few reasons why these may make most sense for me:

Leading edge, so they are interesting and challenging technically
For the same reason, user are more likely to be technical, and happy to work with JustOneGuy and email rather than the typical flashy panel interfaces available everywhere
Less competition
I'll be hosting at a site where the only charges are for power - which should be very low for an ARM

My only concern is that the focus for ARM-based servers seems to be on system where (for example) 100 5W processors are jammed in 2U. Nice density, but I don't pay for space, but I do have do come up with the capital for the initial servers, and this would be way out of my price range.

Some interesting links:

Calxeda Opens The Kimono..
A Sneak Peek At Calxeda’s ARM-Based Servers
KVM for ARM

KVM VPS ?

2011-03-06T19:28:00.002+13:00

Hmm... fun fun fun. My current feeling is that the KVM/VPS is the way to go - slicing a single box into 10 x 50/mo = 500/mo = 6,000 pa.

Needs to be comparatively cheap because there'll be no control panels, web interfaces etc.

Many of the alternative ideas rely on volume - but I can see enough problems getting 10 sign-ups, let alone 100+ with some of the other things I've considered.

So, having a play with a trial VPS at OpenHosting...

Project GreenBox...

2011-02-08T21:45:00.002+13:00

Well, it's been a while, but I'm posting because I have something I'm keen to explore over the next little while - something I'm calling "Project GreenBox"...

So, what is it? Well, it's based on a few facts/trends:

A new local co-location site charging for electricity only - ie FREE space and bandwidth
New low-power consumption servers, including Atom and ARM-based ones
Power-reducing modes on servers and now HDDs when loads are light
The Power Of Linux to be customised and tweaked to further reduce power costs
Stuff like OpenVZ to allow very efficient sharing
The pretty standard LAMP/WordPress etc stack
Good open free tools for management

I don't want to do Just another Web Hosting Company - its the excitement of using these trends to build something MUCH better and more cost-effective and green.

The trick is to:

Clarify the concepts
Do the numbers

...and to do it soon - I'm giving myself to the end of March. Wish me luck!

A great linux.conf.au!

2010-01-23T00:26:00.002+13:00

Susanne and Andrew Ruthven co-ordinated a great event - and did so with an amazing unflappable charm.

The Jeremy Allison talk was a beauty and hit Slashdot etc - great "no holds barred stuff", and interesting for a strong stand against Mono being installed by default. I'd be suprised if it doesn't get a fresh burst of attention when the video gets uploaded ina week or so.

Lots of other great talks - the two most interesting being Tridge on defending patent attacks, and the Albany Senior High School story.

Through out the conf it because increasing clear to me that puppet is "the way to go" - so I was very happy to get a Spot Prize of "Pulling Strings with Puppet"!

LCA2010

2010-01-21T07:29:00.000+13:00

Lots of good stuff here. The keynote yesterday was given by Benjamin Mako Hill. Good guy, and lots of good points but I was suprised that it wasn't "tighter" - and that he allowed himself to be dragged off-stream and into rambling by questions.

Andrew Tridgell's talk on teaching FOSS was great, as was Don Christies on the "Public Sector Remix" - great line about IT departments' "learned helplessness"!

Nice to meet and talk to Andy Fitzsimon and Brenda Wallace at lunch. Fun to see soldering irons, and frying pans (and a Vic's reprap) added to all the other geekiness at the UStay last night.

Looking forward to Jeremy Allison's talk in particular today.

Frustrating time with P2V for Linux...

2009-06-17T21:12:00.001+12:00

Mondorestore ate my disk space, dd over nc didn't progress, Convertor coldboot needed more RAM and clonezilla hung on choosing graphics. Trying another source "testbox" now, but boy this is getting annoying (cpio over ssh is the newest bright idea. It's all a bit too
hard ;-(

ncdu and spacemonger

2009-06-15T14:48:00.001+12:00

Spacemonger - the classic old v1.x - has been an essential tool for me for years, chasing serverspace on MS Windows.

I've just discovered "ncdu" which is just as handy for chasing diskspace on Linux servers over ssh. Wonderfully fast and intuitive!

fdisk, fstab and mount

2009-06-09T21:42:00.002+12:00

Disk space was rapidly disappearing so I plugged another 40GB in. Fairly simple, but had to google about to figure out the UUID business. I mounted it under /var/lib/mysql initially as that's where the growth is, but have now re-jigged it to do all of /var, which is a more standard approach

Used cp -p to copy the files across.

Postgrey is away!

2009-06-08T21:35:00.001+12:00

It's going to be interesting to see what impact this has on my filtering gateway box. Must admit that I'm dreading striking some system that refused to resend...
However, I need the extra blocking power because my Worst Case chap is getting 10 a day :-(

FOX0 explained...

2009-06-07T10:24:00.001+12:00

Thought I might share some thoughts on a little acronym that I came up with. I find it a usefull substitute for: Free Software, Open Source, FOSS or FLOSS.

FOX0 ?

F - freedom, choice, control. The ability to use your hardware, software and data any way you wish.
O - Open source, standards, formats, processes
X - Unix: the philosophy, culture, tools used in AIX, BSD, Linux etc
0 - Zero cost; important in ensuring equal access for students, the poor and those needing many copies

There are already too many acronyms bandied about in this area, so I suggest that if you find this useful then do as I do -treat it as a "hidden list" of areas to cover when discussing Linux or Open Source with those that "don't get it" yet. Just as many speakers find a simple list of headings to be all the notes they need, I'm sure that most of those that *do* "get it" would gave very little problem expanding for five minutes on each of F - O - X and 0

Hope it's helpful.

Bacula, awk and rsync

2009-06-06T11:55:00.001+12:00

Have been having some "fun" bash scripting with awk to track down PTR-less legit mailservers. Hopefully I can put that to rest this week and move onto a proper backup strategy.
Tentative plan is to use bacula and rsync to replicate to a sub-dir on the development box--and add a script to allow that box to "become" the master in case of a meltdown.
I need to check that sa-update is working (Signing issues?), and that AV is working too.

Maia mailguard fun

2009-05-30T17:52:00.003+12:00

I've had some fun with this...
Rather than the "simple appliance" that we really wanted, we've ended up with all the joys and pains of Linux/Postfix/Amavisd/Spamassassin - but adding MySQL/Apache/Maia, and PHPMyAdmin and Webmin. Fun.
Had some real fun when I flooded the system by: (a) turning off connection-stage blacklisting and, (b) cranking amavisd logging. Massive backlog of queued mail... then crashed due to filling the disk! Panicy attempt to mount in some more disk space before I found the d**n amavids log lurking in some dumb place.
Well, I learnt a few things :-)

Notes, Groove, Sharepoint? Google Wave!

2009-05-30T09:40:00.003+12:00

It's interesting to think back to the promise of past apps ..... then see why Wave is so much better

Open, Free, Cross-platform.

It just makes sense.

I remember being very impressed with the MOSS Sharepoint when it came out, but then it was ruined by the typical layers of licensing bullshit, bizarre cost models and lack of cross-platform OS/browser support. Rubbish.

Looking forward to bring able to install a Wave server asap....

Google Trends and Joomla

2009-04-26T12:59:00.001+12:00

Just looked at Plone vs Drupal vs joomla using this. Joomla was the clear winner, so prbly what I'll use for our home site. Which will move to ec2. I need to do a full"scrape" of it asap

Testing 123...

2009-04-26T10:18:00.001+12:00

A quick post test from my iPhone

whee! ...it's been over a year since I posted.

2007-03-13T14:04:00.000+13:00

Crazy. However, just moved to the new more Google-integrated system, and also put a link to the PBwiki that i also don't update very often :-)

Plone it is...

2006-02-01T11:44:00.000+13:00

At LCA2006 I saw a presentation on Plone by an HP staffer (concentrating on its use as a collab tool and knowledge-base for internal teams), which encouraged me to review the state of such things.

Spent a bit of time yesterday and today researching and decided:

* Plone is the way to proceed
* If the Big Boys can live with its database being ZopeDB (no option for MySQL or MSSQL) then so can I
* No it's not PHP or Perl, but Python is cool too

The others I considered were Drupal and Mambo/Joomla.

Plone has a few 'cons': (1) - Unusual Zope/ZopeDB underpinnings and (2) - Steeper learng curve. Also not as easy to 'skin'. The 'pros' were (1) - SMB & NTLM Authentication, (2)Workflow engine, (3) - WebDAV support - along with positive comments on its scalability, and flexability. Overall my impression is that it seems to have more potential as a 'solution for all situations'.

Having said all that, it seems to be a bitch to install on Debian - I failed so far. Simple-pimple install to W32 tho, so I'm evaluating/learning it there for now (running on my work desktop).

The "joys" of old hardware...

2005-09-15T13:08:00.000+12:00

Having a couple of old system failing on a client's site. A pain - you advise all the scanning and repairing but you know they're going to die. Reinstalling all those specialist apps is going to be No Fun At All...

Just spent quite a bit of effort ofver 3 days setting up a nice little stealth monitoring box from an old Thinkpad with a dodgy screen. Screen not a problem since I'm using SSH and VNC (which goes Really Well over a LAN), but last night it locked up, and ClunckClunkCluck... this morning on boot. Mucked about tryiong to get it to boot Knoppix and do a fsck - but it died for good. Bugger!

So, off on the scrouge for some other old kit...

SSH using PK...

2005-06-28T22:35:00.000+12:00

OK, tonight I want to do this - passwordless access to my Linux box from Windows over SSH.

This site looks like what I need - and of course because I'm coming in from a Windows box I'll be using Putty - and this is the story for that part of the equation.

So,

At the PC, run 'puttygen' (taking all defaults - RSA, SSH-2, 1024 - but no passphrase) and save the resulting private key - in my case to priv-key.pps - and copy the txt at the top of the Puttygen screen labelled "Public Key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file"

Now ssh to the Linux box, type ssh -V to check that we're using OpenSSH, then
(assuming we want to login as root):

mkdir /root/.ssh
cd /root/.ssh
vi authorized_keys
"Public Key for pasting into OpenSSH..." text we got from Puttygen>
chmod 700 .ssh
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys

Right, now start Putty and create a config - but in the Connection,Data, AutoLoginName enter root, and in Connection,SSH,Auth section enter the path to the private key (in this case priv-key.pps)

Test.

NB: Putty can log, for debugging, and on my Debian box I found /var/log/loginlog helpful
PS: There is some danger in having no passphrase, but not much...

Tunneling X over ssh!

2005-06-28T10:40:00.000+12:00

Cool fun!

Something I've been meaning to do for a while.

Steps were:

- futz with sshd.conf (very easy) on remote Debian box to enable X forwarding
- install and run Cygwin/X on the home machine
- type startx at the Cygwin bash prompt
- tick X forwarding in 'putty' on the Windows box at home
- Putty in to the Linux box, "init 5" (normally runs in text-mode runlevel 2) and type "xclock"
- It Just Works!
- init back to 2 on the remote Linux box

Windows firewall needed to be told that this was all Ok, but all worked fine - and was not in as "Administartor" on Windows - although of course had to RunAs the Cygwin setup as Admin...

Cool....

PS: Spent *ages* trying to find info on xsabre or even a screenshot- mabe I just have to apt-get it and try it over this funky new system!

Debian 'sarge', RSS etc

2005-06-27T11:35:00.000+12:00

Looks like RSS is going mainstream too, with IE7 going to support it - big announcement at Gnomedex last week.

Bunged the newly stable 'sarge' Debian on a box a week or two ago and roughly setup MySQL, Apache2, PHP and Wordpress. A bit of a mission, and needs some tidying up. Used Bastille to lock the box down - very nice. Also installed 'psad' which is generating some interesting info - looks like the Phillipines is the latest hotbed of crackers and/or bots!

Filezilla does a wonderfull job of scp'ing files across however (removing the need for FTP), but it's obviously expecting at least a 1024 wide screen by the way it lays out its screen. OK on my work machine, but a pain at home.

Podcasting going mainstream...

2005-05-02T09:01:00.000+12:00

A few points:

1 - Paris Hilton started her own podcast (crappy as it turns out, but it may well improve...)

2 - Podcasting and Adam Curry were on mainstream TV the other night - I missed it, but A saw it

3 - Adam Curry's now launched his much-talked-about Podshow site - and is just one of about 20 similar ventures!

Planner - (Real Good Gantt)

2005-04-27T15:41:00.000+12:00

Gnome package "Planner" is now available for Windows (winplanner on sourceforge). Looks really nice. Needs latest GTK installed first, but that's painless.

There's a couple of 'gotchas' on the printing:
(i) In the print dialog there's an option to "select views" - if you select nothing you get noting, and (ii) words come out upside down - buggy printing - but, there's a work-around - just print first to PDF, then open and print the PDF with Acrobat Reader. Funky!

(I tried GanttProject - a Java app - but it was quite basic and horrible by comparison)

working on wxWikiServer...

2005-03-01T10:47:00.000+13:00

Added quite a bit of content last night - TS'd in to work, then web'd across to the wiki running on my workstation's port 82 - sweet.

I'm impressed by how easy and natural it is to add content.

A bit more worryiong is the process of re-doing the 'style via CSS. I'm keen of course, but it looks like a bit of work! I think the best ide may be to print out all CSS then read it through.

Busy busy busy!

2005-02-24T15:31:00.000+13:00

Doing my "P" items (planning) today - and started marking the Imortant ones "I" and the Urgent one's "U" ...ended up with 9 IU's !

(mayby I'd better get cracking knocking them over rather than blogging about it...)

wxWikiServer!

2005-02-10T15:59:00.000+13:00

Boy, this is *nice*....

Installed it today and very very pleased. I'll spend a while bashing the 'look' into shape then really get rocking with it because it has a lot of potential - mainly because its so easy to setup and use.

- oo

PS: Being wx-based it's possible it'll get ported to Linux too, which would be nice.

BeatrIX downloaded...

2005-02-04T14:18:00.000+13:00

Suppossed to be a stripped down 'Grandma's Edition' of Ubantu, which is Debian - so should be a good basis for <> to use.

Will burn it donw tonight and give it a whirl...

Email again - from a web-based system

2005-01-21T16:24:00.000+13:00

Just another test

Not much luck with Knoppix & iPod...

2005-01-19T13:05:00.000+13:00

So, seemed like a good idea to pull down the lates Knoppix and try to use the iPod as a way to keep my settings, docs etc - using the "persistant home" feature.

First hurdle was cutting K - but then problems with it getting a decent resolution on my screen.

After all that I don't think it actually found the iPod....

Oh well, I'll just try again tonight on my home machine. Fun fun fun!

working?

2005-01-18T17:00:00.000+13:00

Test of HTML and #end thingy

2005-01-18T16:59:00.000+13:00

Right! - this email is composed in HTML - and has the hash-end-thingy at the bottom of what I have to say - to strip the "disclaimer/advt" off the end of my email

Lets see how it goes....

Areas of planning...

2005-01-18T16:57:00.000+13:00

- Linux plans (cube, cube2, desktop, rebuilding glamdring, tutorials inhouse, tutorials for others?, evangalising here)

- Strtegic at W - need to be proactive
- Fitness
- Kites
- Language
- Schoolwork with kids

Posting by mail!

2005-01-18T14:37:00.000+13:00

This is pretty cool - posted from my work email

OK!!

2005-01-18T14:13:00.000+13:00

Well, the template's not too bad - but I can't see how I easily choose one of the initial ones. No problem, it's clear that it's very flexable - and the default one if to my taste.

I've just logged out and in again, so that too is pretty easy.

Starting

2005-01-18T14:02:00.000+13:00

Hmmmm looks like we're up and running!

I've not yet read the Terms&Conditions so it may be that theres a hidden problem which will cause me to can this - lets hope not.

The template-choosing bit had a "next" button which I thought meant "show me the next range of template choices" when in FACT it meant "next step now that I've chosen my template"@!?!! Oh, well, I'm sure I can change it.