Unruly Rambling - linux category

Spring Cleaning delivers a needed tutorial for OS X users.

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:50:01 GMT

A month or so ago, I got the keen idea that I wanted to replace a 19" boat anchor of a monitor with something flat panel to gain some desk space. This altruistic goal was accomplished after a 20" Samsung wide screen display showed up on my doorstep for less than $200. I was happy since I reclaimed a nice big corner of my desk. Even though I accomplished my original goal, the printer sitting on the end of the desk irked me too. Unlike the monitor, I'm not able to replace my printer with a smaller model. At least not one that would be significantly smaller. The best I could do was find a better location where it wasn't taking up a square foot of desktop space. My decision was to put it in the desk where two linux boxes resided. One of the linux boxes runs this site, a personal wiki, and cvs repository. The other sits mostly idle as a large backup file server. In order to maintain my current setup, I would need a new smaller computer to do these lightweight tasks. Mac Mini to the rescue! I picked up a refurbished Mac Mini from Apple for less than $500. It's a duo core 1.5ghz which is probably 8 times faster than the linux box it replaced. The good news is that it is also 10 times smaller and looks fantastic sitting out in the open. In addition to relocating the printer in the tower compartment, I also moved the spare paper, DSL modem, and various other office items. My desk looks fantastic now. Don't quit reading yet, there is a point to this entry and it has nothing to do with the neatness of my desk.

Instead of installing CVS on the new Mac Mini, I decided that I would migrate to subversion. This was not as easy of a task as I thought it would be. As I sought to find a decent tutorial online, I came up short time and time again. I never did end up finding anything that I could follow step by step and get to where I had a subversion repository front ended by Apache, using Apache authentication running on OS X. Instead I used bits and pieces of content from a half dozen sites to get everything to work. For those of you that are in search of something similar or have run into this same brick wall, the following tutorial is for you. I did my best to document every step along the way. If you run into something that is ambiguous or needs updating, please let me know. I intend to keep this up to date.

HOWTO: Installing Subversion(1.4.3) and Apache(2.0.59) on OS X(10.4.9)

Shotty uptime for the past week

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:17:17 GMT

For the past week, I've noticed that my site was going down every couple hours and I'd have to restart JBoss in order to get it to come back. Being in busy mode all week, I didn't have time to figure out why. Yesterday, I spent 10 minutes digging around in my logs to find out that some asshat(borrowed from Hani) was hitting my server every couple milliseconds requesting my blog as an attempt to infect me with tons of referral spam. My poor server was crashing with out of memory errors at a record pace and it was getting worse and worse by the minute. His calls were coming in from 2 distinct IP Addresses (217.23.176.2 , 217.23.177.249), both of which originate in Russia. To get around this, I configured iptables to DROP packets from these addresses. All is fine since. The thing that concerns me is that this is quite the reactive approach and could start again at any moment. Thanks to the free service provided by SiteUptime, I get a text message sent to my cell phone when my site goes down. This will help a bit. What I'd like to do is write some sort of script to learn what ip addresses might be doing this, add their ip on the fly and restart iptables. If this becomes a problem, I'll look into this more.

So the moral of the story is that if you are pathetic enough to inject referral spam, I hope you die a long painful death in the dungeons of hell. In the meantime, I will ignore you with the help of iptables.

Preferred OS when running Java Server Apps on Intel hardware

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 00:15:18 GMT

Overwhelmingly Linux is the choice. I voted, did you?

Man pages displaying funky characters

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:50:36 GMT

Changing LANG in /etc/sysconfig/i18n from en_US.UTF-8 to en_US did the trick for me.

No More Windoze

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 04:04:31 GMT

Well, the time has come to find a new distribution since Redhat will no longer be providing support for 8.0(current version supporting this site). Since Im most familiar with Redhat, Fedora was an obvious choice for my new distro. To ease into this transition and guarantee zero downtime, Ive decided to install Fedora onto the only Windoze box that I currently have. Thats right, my only windoze box will run windoze no more. I guess one could argue that Im upgrading the OS. My plan is to install everything on this machine that my current Redhat 8.0 server provides. My current "can't live without" installed apps are JBoss, MySQL, JAMES, and CVS. Once these are all up and running, Ill do the same to the Redhat 8.0. This will give me poor mans failover in case of a vaporized hard disk or some other hardware failure. I say poor mans failover since redirecting traffic will involve manual reconfiguration of my router.

Fedora Core
Bootup with Disk 1 in CDROM
1) Language Selection
English
2) Keyboard Configuration
U.S. English
3) Mouse Configuration
Generic Wheel Mouse (PS/2)
4) Monitor Configuration
Sony Multiscan 17sf
5) Installation Type
Workstation
6) Disk Partitioning Setup
Manually partition with Disk Druid
7) Disk Setup
/dev/hda1 nfts
/dev/hda2 /boot
/dev/hda3 /
/dev/hda4 swap
8) Boot Loader Configuration
WinXP /dev/hda1 default
Fedora Core /dev/hda3
9) Network Configuration
hostname: pegasus.shoesobjects.com
manual network settings
10) Firewall configuration
No firewall
11) Additional Language Support
none
12) Timezone Selection
America/Chicago
13) Set Root Password
13) Package Installation Defaults
customize software packages to be installed
+ KDE Desktop Environment
+ Server Configuration Tools

Fedora HOWTO apt-get Download the apt-get RPM for Fedora Core here. Once you have installed it, you will need to retrieve an up to date package list using the following command apt-get update. Now that we have the latest package listing for everything installed on the system, we should upgrade the installed packages to the latest and greatest versions. Upon running apt-get upgrade, I see that I have 32 packages to upgrade. By typing a Y at the prompt, I will begin to download all of the upgraded packages, 56.3MB to be specific. Gee, this kinda feels like windows update except I don't have to reboot afterwards :)

Other Packages Installed

More to come.........