One other interesting talk at Ontario Linux Fest was hearing Jon “maddog” Hall give a keynote. I remember Maddog giving a talk at Real World Linux back in 2004; in fact, I even wrote about it. Maddog’s been around the block many times, which is why I was surprised to hear him give a keynote on how the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) and Linux-based thin clients are going to save the world. I’m overstating that a bit, but I feel I have to vehemently rebut. My thesis is: We’ve been on thin clients before, they were called VT100 green screens, and nobody really wants to go back – damn the peripheral factors.
performance tuning and optimization of high-traffic websites
A few weekends ago, I got up at the crack of dawn and headed out to the first (annual, I hope) Ontario Linux Fest. The admission price of $40 clearly signalled that this was a grassroots gathering of Linux hobbyists, but I’m sure many of those in attendance were also professional developers and/or system administrators. Although some of the talks were more show-and-tell that I would have hoped, I had to keep in mind the target audience, and I still learned a few things, particularly regarding the optimization of high traffic websites – thanks to Khalid Baheyeldin for his talk on this topic.
Science & Sons at Nuit Blanche Toronto
Meredith & I went to Nuit Blanche in Toronto over the weekend and came across Science & Sons‘ installation on the grounds of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health on Queen Street West. They welded together a series of trumpet horns with mouthpieces into which you could plug iPod earphones. I knew this looked familiar, so I visited their website – to discover that they are the ones responsible for the Phonofones exhibited this year at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (TOAE)!
For those who weren’t able to attend TOAE this year, Science and Sons have crafted iPod “phonographs” out of ceramic, into which one can plug earbud headphones. Thus, by using solely passive amplification, the output of one’s iPod can be boosted to up to 55 dB. Phonograph horn technology is, thusly, born again.
Right now the Phonofones, starting at CAD $450, are slightly beyond our budget, although they would definitely make a fascinating and practical conversation piece (no pun intended). I’m hoping that Science & Sons can reach some sort of licensing deal with a manufacturer to produce them on a larger scale.
WordPress upgrades, LISA ’07
WordPress 2.2.3 was released a little while ago, and I finally thought I should say something about the upgrade process as documented. Can anyone think of a reason why I can’t just download the tarball and diff the contents against the previous version’s tarball, and then run the upgrade.php? That’s certainly what I’ve been doing so far, and have not had any problems. This way I also don’t need to “watch out” for dangling objects in my wp-content directory, since that stuff will get ignored by the patch file. I only wish the WordPress authors could issue a patch file so that I don’t need to do this myself (and it would be nice if the authors could also tar up each distribution from a directory named wordpress-x.y.z instead of just wordpress)
In other news, I decided to fly to Dallas, TX this year to attend the LISA conference, sponsored by the USENIX Association. It’s my first time going to LISA, mostly because of the expense of doing so. Fortunately, this year I have some Air Canada Aeroplan points to use, so my airfare is essentially free (except for the $131.02 in taxes that I have to pay), but registration is still costing me around $700 and the hotel will be $875. All in all, I expect to spend just short of $2,000 on the conference. Sadly, my employer doesn’t have a policy around paying for conferences. They only reimburse for training programs, and even those need to be approved via a lengthy bureaucratic process. Hopefully my manager and I will, at some point, manage to convince the HR folks that the best “training” you can give an IT person is to keep them up to date with new developments in the relevant field, rather than sending them on meaningless courses.
Highpoint Linux Open Source Driver for RR174x Updated
Highpoint has finally updated their Linux Open Source Driver for the RR174x series of SATA RAID adapters. I’m hoping that this will resolve the inability to compile the driver under newer versions of the Linux kernel, such as for the updates that have been issued for Fedora 7. However, my Linux box at home is currently turned off, since I’m on vacation. I won’t have a chance to test it until I get back, but I thought other users of this hardware might be interested!
building AMANDA for MacPorts
Before I left on vacation, I was using one of CBC‘s cast-off Power Macintoshes (grey G4 tower with 256 MB of RAM) as a build box for creating a MacPorts port of the AMANDA backup system. I tarred up the Portfile and associated patches and have them available – if anyone using a Mac wants to help me test them while I’m away from my regular computer, please drop me a line via the comments and I’ll send it to you!
hacking the Samsung a920 mobile phone
I spent part of the weekend hacking my company-issued Samsung a920 cell phone. I guess “hacking” is a bit of a strong term – my sole objective was to get certain MIDP applications installed on it. I have a nameless-but-trustworthy-source inside Bell Mobility that confirms they block the download of MIDP apps that it doesn’t like, for example, MidpSSH or Opera Mini. Presumably, they do this by parsing the JAD file and rejecting source domains in the MIDlet-Jar-URLthat aren’t in a whitelist.
Fortunately, this thread on HowardForums gives you the lowdown on how to break into the a920 firmware to forcibly load MIDP applications on there. I had to really screw around with UniCDMA (i.e. randomly selecting different phone models) before it would spit out my SPC, but eventually I got it. The instructions on using Qualcomm’s EFS Explorer worked like a charm.
I have to admire the phone developers for their humour in naming various directories on the phone’s filesystem. The root is called "brew", presumably because the phone is Java-capable. The _policy.txt file that you can overwrite in order to remove some of the restrictions on the phone lives in a directory called "obione". (I didn’t touch the _policy.txt because I accomplished my goal just by writing the apps to the phone’s filesystem, which is good enough for me.)
Anyway, I now have Opera Mini and MidpSSH running nicely on the phone! (Nicely, I guess, if you consider that typing SSH commands using T9 is pretty painful.)
so what SLES 10 service pack am I really running?
I have to start by giving the punch line first: I’m just appalled at Novell’s support story around SLES and SLED 10. In this article, I’ll explain why. Continue reading
installing Tomcat 5.5 on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
It was busy in June and July over at $WORK, so I didn’t get a chance to write any entries here. Some of the work I’ve been doing include turning off all legacy servers (among the legacy servers are only 2 FreeBSD boxes and a handful of HP/UX dinosaurs, but the rest of the production environment is SUSE Linux Enterprise), shepherding the BlueArc storage upgrade through (a huge pallet containing disks, controllers, disk shelves, and a replacement Fibre Channel switch arrived last week), and, of course, planning our upgrade to a modern Apache/Java environment. This will consist of Apache 2.x with a Tomcat 5.5 back end — a far cry from our current Apache 1.x and Tomcat 3.x setup.
One of the major challenges is getting Tomcat 5.5 running on SLES 9 under a Java 1.5.x virtual machine. Actually, it’s not so much the “running” part — I’m sure that since it’s Java, it would just run if I did the old tar zxvf tomcat-5.5.tar.gz && make && make install dance. But we’re after sensible package management here, and that means trying to make SLES 9 behave the standard way. SLES 9 is missing a lot of the “standard” tools that folks use to manage Java apps; it has no jpackage-utils built-in, it doesn’t use the alternatives system, and it can’t talk to Yum repositories out of the box. The work instructions I developed here hack up the base OS a bit to bolt on these tools, but ultimately do the job.
The long-term solution, of course, is to move to either SLES 10 or RedHat Enterprise Linux 5. SLES 10 ships Tomcat 5.0.x out of the box (just like SLES 9) so on the surface, it doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. But they have moved to the alternatives system; jpackage-utils is bundled with the base system, and ZMD (for what it’s worth) will talk to Yum repositories. (Of course, that’s in theory: in practice, as with many Novell tools, it’s broken.) RHEL 5 seems like the obvious answer, since it ships Tomcat 5.5 right out of the box.
Anyway, that’s a bit of a digression. Here are my directions for getting Tomcat 5.5 installed and properly package-managed on SLES 9 with JPackage. Continue reading
Top 10 Things That ZMD Is Doing While “Waking Up”
| 10 | Ordering CDs from Bill Gates’ Amazon.com wishlist just like RRDtool claims to do when running configure. |
| 9 | Booting Windows XP and running CHKDSK. |
| 8 | Defragmenting /usr/lib so that Mono can run more efficiently. |
| 7 | Converting your /var partition from ext3 to FAT-16. |
| 6 | Drawing the Windows “flying folders” in the background. |
| 5 | Downloading patches from the RedHat Network and then pretending them came from Novell. |
| 4 | Installing IPX/SPX for Linux and registering with any eDirectory servers it can find. |
| 3 | Launching Python for Windows to run the old version of rug that didn’t suck (as badly). |
| 2 | Upgrading the TCP/IP stack on your computer to support Web 2.0. |
And the number one thing ZMD is doing while waking up:
| 1 | Downloading YUM and creating YUM repositories so that when you throw ZMD out the window in frustration, you can still update your software. |