Author: Jan Dembowski (page 93 of 96)

June 10, 2006

openSUSE upgrade

I moved my wordpress blog onto the server in my basement. The old server was a dual CPU PIII running at 993 Mhz with a gig of RAM.

The server in the basement is PII 450Mhz box with 256MB ram so it was chugging. I wanted to install the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) for performance reasons but when I ran the command to install it I got back that my version of php was not supported.

openSUSE 10.1 comes with php 5.1.2 so I ran the upgrade via yast (System Update). This had the fun effect of rendering my server un-bootable. The kernel package did not really install so last night I did some quick surgery and got the system booted. This afternoon I installed the DVD drive from my workstation and got the system properly updated.

APC still did not install. Suse and the phpize command (php5-devel package) is apparently broken. Fortunately this webpage has a list of additional repositories. I added LAB-Project since they maintain updated php5 packages including one for APC.

After I added the apc extension to the php5.ini file, the wordpress pages load almost twice as fast before. Mysql was updated to version 5 so that may have also been a factor.

June 3, 2006

Half-Life Blues

Half-Life 2: Episode One keeps crashing.

I figured it would be related to my Audigy sound card so I removed it and turned on the built in RealTek AC97. While I was at it I removed the wintel PCI modem. I never used it and wanted to make my PC as friendly to steam as possible.

I optimized my hard drive, ran the whole Symantec Norton tools, etc. I was able to play further but still eventually keeps crashing.

Sigh. Need to get a new PC, this one is becoming a pain to support.

Update: Last night I booted up into Ubuntu Linux, ran the latest Transgaming Cedega application and installed Episode One on it.

Amazingly it installed and ran. Still locked up though. The only difference was that it locked up the application and not the whole desktop. I was able to kill Cedega and not have the whole computer sieze up.

Transgaming rocks. Up until the game locked up Half-Life 2 ran at full speed.

I so need a new PC. The only thing I have not tried is swapping out the video card.

June 1, 2006

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

First person shooters are great fun (usually) and I have purchased and completed all of the Half-Life games. Half-Life 2 ended with a cliff hanger.

The next game in the series Half-Life 2: Episode 1 was made available today. I had pre-ordered and had the locked gamed downloaded and ready to be unlocked for a week now. After playing it for less than an hour it looks like good fun and continues the game.

The LOADING… portion is a pain. My PC is a few years old but it’s a P4 3.2GHZ with HT, has one gigabyte of RAM, a Nvidia 6800 AGP w/256MB, etc.

The loading of data is death and kills the flow of the game. I’ll do the usual optimization and make sure nothing is competing with the game. Once the loading screen is done the game plays very well but this is a pain.

May 13, 2006

Ubuntu upgrade to 6.06 Flight 7

easy On my workstation I had been running Ubuntu Linux 5.10. I primarily run Windows XP Pro because that is the environment that my games run in.

I had read that 6.06 beta was coming along very nicely so I booted up on Linux and used the updater to get the latest 5.10 updates.

The Ubuntu web page at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperFlight7 has very easy upgrade instructions. I opened up a terminal window and just ran

gksudo “update-manager -d”

This downloaded and installed over 1400 software packages. It was so easy. All I had to do was modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf so that the device driver became nv instead of nvidia. I probably could have kept the nvidia driver since the old kernel was preserved but as I said I am not running games and don’t need the accelerated 3D drivers yet.

The experience was so simple and easy to do. This confirms my idea of running SuSE on the server and Ubuntu on the workstation.

May 8, 2006

Moving WordPress

This blog was running on Stefan’s DSL connection and with me tinkering with it I was using up his bandwidth. Usually when he was trying to connect to the office and get some work done.

I have a very good connection to the Internet via Optimum Online. It’s a dynamically assigned address but does not change and even if it does I run a dynamic DNS client to tell my DNS server when I’ve moved. So I decided that I would move the blog and change the whole URL. Easy right?

I wanted to create the virtual host blog.dembowski.net on my basement web server dixie.dembowski.net while maintaining both virtual hosts. Oh yeah and use only one IP address.
I wanted to change the host name and the web page URL from http://www.dembowski.net/wordpress/ to http://blog.dembowski.net/.

Setting up the virtual server

I added to my DNS zone dembowski.net a new record for blog.dembowski.net:

blog.dembowski.net. 3600 IN CNAME dixie.dembowski.net.

A while back I switched my server’s Linux distribution from Fedora to SuSE. One of the appeals was that SuSE comes with a reasonable configuration tool called yast.

Yast has a section for creating virtual hosts in Apache, and I thought how hard can this be?

After killing lots of time and totally breaking the web server configuration I ended up removing the Apache packages, deleting /etc/apache2 directory and /etc/sysconfig/apache2 file (options and configs remain even if you remove the software packages).

# rpm -e apache2-mod_php5 apache2-prefork apache2
# rm -rf /etc/apache2 /etc/sysconfig/apache2

I used yast to re-install the same packages, ran the online update, configured apache and got back a basic no frills web server running.

Most Linux distributions have put a conf.d directory in Apache’s configuration directory. It works like this: any file with the extension .conf gets included in the configuration. I knew about this but figured using yast would be easier.

So much for that idea. I went into yast one last time to enable the apache modules php5 and rewrite. Enabling mod_rewrite is not enough, you also need to turn on the FollowSymLinks option or it just does not work.

The configuration file I created in /etc/apache2/conf.d contains the following lines

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName dixie.dembowski.net
DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs
ServerAdmin webmaster@dembowski.net
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/dixie.dembowski.net-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/dixie.dembowski.net-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName blog.dembowski.net
DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs/wordpress
ServerAdmin webmaster@dembowski.net
RewriteEngine On
<Directory /srv/www/htdocs/wordpress>
Options +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/blog.dembowski.net-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/blog.dembowski.net-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>

Not too complicated really. Now when I point my web browser to either host name I get two different web pages.

Preparing WordPress

First off read this whole article, and seriously this part. The WordPress documentation is really good and helped a lot. Normally you would want to do one or the other; being a “challenging” person I was determined to do both.

I did NOT read the documentation. There is a step where you need to tell WordPress the URI for referencing itself. The documentation says Update Options -> Logout -> “Do not try to open/view your blog now!” They are not kidding around, WordPress sends you to the web page it thinks it is running on and not the host that it actually is running.

Restoring the web server files and directory onto the new box was not a problem. And the mysql backup was edited with vi and I changed all of the references from http://www.dembowski.net/wordpress/ to http://blog.dembowski.net/. I had to have missed one because every time I went to the web page http://blog.dembowski.net/ I was sent to the old server whenever I clicked on anything including the admin web pages.

There probably is a better way to do this but I eventually just put into my workstations hosts file the IP address of the new box and claimed it was www.dembowski.net. Just to play it safe I shut down the old web server, logged into the new box and fixed all of the options with the new info. Once I was all done I removed the bogus entry in my hosts file.

WordPress’s PHP scripts on my box kept running out of memory and crashed. I changed the file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and changed the memory_limit from 8M to 1632M That seems to have taken care of it.

All that was left to do is make sure that anyone going to the old web page gets sent to the new one. On the old server I changed the .htaccess file in the wordpress directory to now read

RewriteEngine On
RedirectMatch ^/wordpress/(.*) http://blog.dembowski.net/$1 [L,R]

Apache’s mod_rewrite rocks. This took any web requests for http://www.dembowski.net/wordpress/anything and redirected the web browser to go to the new URL with http://blog.dembowski.net/anything.

Blog successfully migrated to a new host and a new directory. Next up putting SSL back on one of my virtual web servers.

April 26, 2006

A tank of gas for $50.75

“I think you’ll hear the president say very clearly that he will not tolerate price gouging,” McClellan said.

CNN.com – Bush orders gasoline price probe – Apr 25, 2006.

I don’t really dislike the oil companies making money, and except for it hurting my pocket I don’t even know if the oil companies are doing anything illegal. If they made “normal” profits would anyone be upset with them or would people be upset with the source of oil again?

Tonight I stopped to fill up my gas tank. My fuel gauge is broken on my car (yeah, have to get it fixed). It shows how much gas I have based on how the car “feels” and it had been a while since the last fill up. Per the manufacturer I fill it with premium gas. I drive an SUV so some more pain for that.

A little math here: premium at the Mobil station was $3.459 per gallon (saying $3.46 is way too straight forward), I filled up 14.671 gallons, rounded comes out to $50.75.

Last year we had hurricane Katrina as the excuse. But the real problem here is that gas is driven by supply and demand. Congress wont even make oil company executives swear to tell the truth. What will President Bush do, put Dick Cheney in charge of investigating the oil companies?

Oil companies are (probably) not breaking any laws, they get a pass from the government on whatever they want. Why should they build more infrastructure in or around the U.S.? We have laws that limit that, we have regulations (good or bad) which make it hard to do. Why ruin a good thing when congress and the administration make it easier to rake in the dough than create new infrastructure?

Except for politicians making pointless noise, I expect prices to keep going up.

April 14, 2006

Burnout Revenge vs PGR3

Okay I’ve gotten the Xbox 360 and have been playing for a couple of days now. My son really likes it and I have to keep him off of the console for the most of the day. He only can play for a little more than an hour and with me the whole time.

I am beginning to see why people prefer game consoles. I had been playing PGR3 which is a great looking game and easy to get into.

It’s a straight you drive, you win, and get money kind of game. It’s lots of fun and very addictive and the more races you win, the more parts of the game are unlocked.

Then I started playing Burnout Revenge. This is really just like PGR3 except you score points by making your opponents crash in horrible ways. You have racing just like PGR3 but you also get to check and force the other cars into the walls, traffic, etc. You get a boost for the more aggressive driving you do.

Burnout Revenge really appeals to me. I like the driving of PGR3 but the other game is great with all the things you can do and points you can get. Once I get more practice I’ll play on the Internet and see how I do against the 10 to 15 year old crowd.

April 8, 2006

Woot: Xbox 360 arrives

XBOX-360 Okay when the xbox 360 came out, like many folks I figured I’d just go and pick one up at the store.

R-i-i-i-i-ght. Supply was non-existent and people were lining up the night before. So I ordered the premium system online at EBgames. It arrived Thursday. My boy loves it. I got the racing game Full Auto for the kids, it is a game where you drive around and blow stuff up. I also picked up a few other shooter games that I don’t allow the kids to even see.

The graphics are amazing and the system interface is very well thought out. I hooked up the box to the Internet, setup my online “gamer tag”? and poof. In another racing game Project Gotham Racing 3 I am going through the qualifier races. Thanks to Internet connectivity I get to see online how badly I rank in the world…

I usually do all my gaming on my PC, so switching to a console after all these years ought to be a challenge. As long as I’m careful as to what games the kids can see or play it ought to be fun for all.

April 1, 2006

Kids and parties

Kids rule! Obey the kids!

Ahem.

Today Lily and I took our son to a classmate’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. This is the 3rd one this year (it’s April 1st) and all the kids had a good time.

Next week we’ll take our son to another birthday party. It is funny to realize that our weekend social schedule is based on our kids schedule. This will happen more and more, price of being a parent I guess. When our daughter starts getting (and having) parties then either we will have to turn some invitations down or just lose our free time.

I am not really a party person; Thursday we went briefly to a friends get together for getting a job at a new company. Lily and I left that gathering to catch the 8:15pm train out of Penn station. It was good catching up with friends and I wished that I’d stayed and taken the 9:15pm train.

March 12, 2006

Little kids pick up everything

Kids do say the darndest things.

Last night the family went to a Spanish restaurant in Smithtown (15 minute drive). The food was good and everyone enjoyed themselves. The kids got sufficiently wired but after walking them around they came back to reality.

On the drive home something happened and my son let out an “Oh Sugar!”