Mostly Harmless

Mostly about my amusement

Category: Software (page 14 of 22)

March 23, 2008

An odd Easter Sunday

Today is not exactly how I intended to enjoy Easter Sunday. I’m baby sitting my main server in my basement right now. This morning at 6 AM I noticed my server in the basement was not passing traffic since 2 AM. So I rebooted the server and it came back.

I like to attend the 8 AM mass at St. Mathews because I don’t like crowds. Today we got the kids dressed up and went to church. Afterwards we went to Friendlies for breakfast. 9 AM Sunday is a great time to go; no crowds at all.

At 9:45 AM I received an e-mail on my Blackberry that my server was down again. I use the free service from Service Uptime. Yes I snmp monitor my cable modem, server CPU, server throughput, etc. and no I’m not an Uber Geek. We got home, we snapped some pictures (we were all dressed up after all) and I got to work rebooting my server.

Hard rebooting a Linux server is odd. I generally only run tested packages on my servers and I’ve had Linux boxes go for months until I had to reboot it for some kernel patch. So when this one started acting up I’m getting worried. One of my disks sounds like the fan from an old car so that might be a hint.

I pulled out a 300 GB from the Netgear SC-101 since I was not using it. I have a ton of data on the old drive so right now I have both drives mounted and am copying data from the lawn mower and onto the new 300 GB drive.

Going from one ATA bus to the other is about 8 MB/sec so it’s taking a long time. Copying data from your disk is like cleaning up your basement. If you have not looked at it for more than 6 months then you can probably lose it. Once I get what I want of the old drive, I’ll place it on the shelf and close up the server.

If it keeps happening then I’ll just get a Dell refurb PC.  In the meanwhile the kids are having a blast playing in the basement while their Dad waits for his server to finish.

March 19, 2008

Installed Vista SP1

Vista SP1

This morning the 120 MB download for Vista Sp1 was available. The download was fast but the scary part is that the update eventually happened while my screen was totally off in power saving mode. That took more than 10 minutes.

That’ll cause some people to power off their boxes and cause no end of horror. I wonder if this breaks anything? So far for all of 10 minutes it’s working.

March 9, 2008

Playing with WordPress 2.5 beta

I keep a SVN based copy of the new WordPress 2.5-beta1 for playing with. I’m doing this because at sometime the version I’m running 2.3.x might not be supported for patches. Going from 2.2 to 2.3 was a no brainer, tags are a huge difference. 2.5 might not get me to jump for a while.

On the outside I can’t see much reason for not converting. Some of my plugins don’t work but that ought to be resolved by the time 2.5 is released. If the performance is improved then that’s a good reason right there.

What will get me to hold off is the little things. I dislike the new interface. The 2.3.x shows it’s age meaning that it is well thought out and is missing some pet peeves from 1.5 or 2.0. Version 2.5 feels like they are trying to get to “Web 2.0” and are not making it. The organization is odd after using WordPress for a couple of years. The widget interface is downright counter intuitive for me.

I’ll keep using 2.3.x for a while and just see how 2.5 turns out.

February 22, 2008

openSUSE 10.3 server upgrade

I did not really mean to upgrade my home server today, it just worked out that way.

Weeks ago I cleaned up my basement computer room and Alek had dropped off an old PC for my use. It is a dual Pentium III 800 MHz machine with 700 odd megabytes of RAM. It does not work well with my old WinTV PVR-350, Windows Media Center Edition 2005, and can’t play most AVI or MPEG files.

My server is a 3GHz P4 with 1 GB of RAM and a okay Geforce 5600 FX in it. So I figured I’d swap the drives and just use the server as a workstation and vice versa. Just to be on the safe side I moved my blog to the backup server on my VPS.

The server hard disk would not boot on the PIII box. The initrd image did not have the drivers for the ide system in the new box. Getting the initrd updated would have required the openSUSE 10.1 which I could not find.

I did have a recently burned openSUSE 10.3 DVD lying around so after a couple of hours I was able to get my server working by upgrading from 10.1 to 10.3. The updated 10.3 YaST is faster than before and I’m going to start using zypper to keep my system up to date.

Once I get the system to a point where I am comfortable then I’ll move the blog back to my basement.

February 18, 2008

Ubuntu 7.10 on Virtual PC 2007

Installing Ubuntu on more time

Today it’s President’s Day, it’s raining, and the kids are off this week.  So naturally I am goofing around with my PC. I’ll head to the basement soon to play with the kids but first I want to setup something on my workstation.

My main workstation is a Dell 700 720 with a Core 2 Duo and a pair of nvidia GeForce 7900’s.

It’s a great machine and I am currently playing Call of Duty 4, Crysis, and a couple of others.  But I really enjoy working in Ubuntu. I just don’t want to give up the games.

I installed Virtual PC 2007 on my workstation and enabled hardware-assisted Virtualization.  I captured an Ubuntu 7.10 iso on my disk and began running the installation. I created a disk for the virtual PC and began the installation.

I knew that once the live CD booted up I would have problems with the X11 driver.  So I ctrl-alt-F1 and ran “sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf”. I replaced the “Depth 24” with “Depth 16”, saved the file, did alt-F7 to switch back to the X11 screen and then alt-backspace to restart the X11 server.

The mouse still did not work.  Google is my friend and I learned that when I boot the CD press F6 and append the following to the kernel boot parameters ” i8042.noloop”.  The article suggested running the Virtual PC in safe graphics mode but that went very low resolution on me.

Wash, rinse, repeat the “Depth 16” portion.  I’m now installing on my Virtual PC 2007 Ubuntu with a color depth of 16 and a working mouse.  My system has only 2 GB of RAM but since I upgraded to the XPS 720 motherboard I can go nuts with the 800 Mhz stuff.

Vista 64 with 8 GBs of RAM, that sounds like a good upgrade.

After the install I modified the /boot/grub/menu.lst to add to the kopt line i8042.noloop as well as to the end of the kernel line.  That’s probably not the place to put it but it works for now and I’m going to continue working on it. I’ve just got the networking going and I’m putting on 187 updates since the iso image was created.

February 16, 2008

Movable Type to WordPress

Over at my brother Stefan’s blog, he’s been running Movable Type for years. It bugged be because his server was slow, the theme was dated, it lacked a good archive page, etc.

Mostly I did not like the look or the speed. Stefan takes really good pictures and I thought he should have a web site that can show off some of his work. What I ended up showing him was good enough that he told me to go ahead and do it.

Read on for what I had to do to make it all work. Read more

January 4, 2008

Bad mail queuing in Postfix

Yesterday around 12:36 AM my main server mowgli went into a temporay coma (a disk volume fell down and did not get back up) and was not receiving mail.

No problem, thanks to the magic of DNS MX records, mail goes to my backup server dixie. Good thing I was clever and had dixie forward all mail to Optimum Online’s mail relay… when the mail relay got the dembowski.net mail it tried to deliver it to mowgli (who was down) and then back to dixie. The mail dixie got was sent into a loop with my ISP’s mail relay.

Each hop is added to the messages SMTP header and when an MTA sees that it is looping with itself then it typically sends the sender a non-delivery message and discards the original mail.

I lost about 20 hours of mail messages for my domain. Once mowgli was fixed I made a change to mowgli’s Postfix configuration. In the main.cf file I changed this line from

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated, permit_mynetworks, reject_unauth_destination, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org

to now include a whitelist

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated, permit_mynetworks, reject_unauth_destination, check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/whitelist, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org

The /etc/postfix/whitelist file just contains one line for dixie’s IP address

24.46.186.255 OK

I ran postmap hash:/etc/postfix/whitelist and tested. From dixie I was able to telnet to mowgli on TCP port 25 and send mail by typing in the SMTP commands directly. Before this I would get an error message like

554 Service unavailable; Client host [24.46.186.255] blocked using zen.spamhaus.org; http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=24.46.186.255

Now my main server accepts mail just from that IP address on the whitelist before the Spamhaus check occurs. The reject_rbl_client check is still working (open mail relays are BAD) it’s just my one IP address that gets a pass.

The configuration on my backup server dixie was simple. I added to main.cf one line

transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport

The file /etc/postfix/transport contained

dembowski.net smtp:[mowgli.dembowski.net]

I ran postmap hash:/etc/postfix/transport and restarted postfix. Now when dixie needs to deliver mail to dembowski.net it sends it directly to mowgli. If mowgli is unreachable it will just queue up the mail until mowgli becomes available. Every other domain gets forwarded to my ISP’s mail relay and all is good.

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Jan Dembowski

Jan Dembowski

I am a software enthusiast who is easily amused and definitely mostly harmless.

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