John's Blog

I have not heard much about the oil spill lately and I’m afraid that people/the media are moving on too quickly.

I did find this update on the Associated Press.

I just don’t get why this is a story at all. Just leave the guy alone.

Earlier this week, I started getting a ton of email from the admin functionality in my blog.  This even after I thought I had disabled all commenting for unregistered users.  I figured it was because I have not been updating the wordpress version at all.

I bit the bullet and upgraded to the latest version and also activated two plug-ins…reCaptcha which allows anonymous comments and Akismet which attempts to filter out SPAM comments.  I’ve also relaxed the restriction on commenting for users that are not logged in.

Hopefully this keeps out the SPAM noise while making it possible for legitimate comments to be posted.

We’ll see how this goes!  Stay tuned.

I finally took the plunge and switched to a hosted web service, GoDaddy.com.  I’ve got too many machines running in this house and an electric bill to prove it!  With multi-year discount and a save $20 coupon code, the three years of hosting on there basic plan is $80 which seems more than fair to me.

 So far, this site (http://blog.samolyk.com) is the only site I have up and running.  One of these days I need to get a professional site up to represent what Samolyk, Inc. is all about.

 I’ve still got samolyk.com registered at domaindirect.com since I’m got all my email forwarding set up there — I think I’m going to keep it that way for now.

 Anyhow, so far I’m diggin’ what GoDaddy has to offer and you can’t beat the prices.

Between the holidays and a very busy January, February, and March I have been a “bad blogger” — having allowed such a long period of “radio silence”. I actually just found this post in draft form that I had started in January but never got round to publishing. Aside from “real work” (i.e. work that pays the bills :-), I’ve been taking care of some sys admin kind of things like:

• Switching my wireless network from two WAPs (a ‘b’ and a ‘g’ access point) using WEP for security to a single WAP using WPA and a strong passphrase. This required using an add on ‘g’ card for the older Fujitsu laptop.
• Switching to a managed antivirus/firewall solution for the machines on my LAN at home
• Experimenting with VMWare — bought the Workstation version which allows you to create, manage (cool things like cloning and snapshots), and run virtual machines on your PC (e.g. I was running w2k verver with Oracle 8.1.7 in a vm on my WinXP pro desktop). Then I used the box that I freed up to set up VMWare Server with CentOS 4.3 without X (i.e no desktop UI) as the host OS. Picked up a second 200GB drive (400GB total) and upgraded RAM to 3GB. This allows for plenty of storage for VM files and plenty of RAM for running multiple VMs simultaneously. This is way cool technology and allows the flexibility to maintain multple configurations to support multiple environments for various client projects and bring them up and down on demand. This sure beats my old practice of switching harddrives in and out!

I am finally getting around to trying to get a first-hand answer to the question:

“Can I abandon Windows yet?”

So I bought a license for the deluxe desktop distribution of Xandros, based on the Debian Linux distribution.  Additionally, I bought a license for Crossover Office 5.0, Standard which is reported to support Microsoft Office 2003.

The box I’m using for this “experiment” is an AMD Athlon 1800 with 1GB RAM, an 80GB hard drive, a Gigabit Ethernet adapter, and a DVD Burner.  So a middle of the road box with a decent amount of RAM.

The Xandros installation is about as painless as it comes.  It just works.

CrossOver office was also a snap to install since they had a distribution especially for Xandros.  I was also suprised that when I popped in the Office 2003 CD in that it installed without a hitch.  I launched Word and activated the program (it was previously activated on this same machine under Windows XP and I was worried that I might have issues.

Then I tried to lauch Outlook, since that is a key app for me, and…Houston, we have a problem here :-(  Apparently Outlook requires Internet Explorer to be installed.  OK Fine.  I install IE 6.0 using the Crossover Installation Wizard.  Still, Outlook won’t start.  I do a bit more “digging” and find that what I now have is Office 2003 installed in a win2000 “bottle” and IE 6 installed in a win98 “bottle”.  Not sure why IE would install in a different bottle, so I deleted the win98 bottle and tried to install into the win2000 bottle, but I was warned that this would likely cause errors and decided not to try.

Office 2003 isn’t much use to me without Outlook, so I deleted the win2000 bottle and was back to square one.  With that I decided to try to forch IE6 into a win2000 bottle.  It threatened the same bit about causing errors.  When the install seemed complete, there was no sign of IE6 installed. I checked the desktop and menus for an IE icon, and the Crossover Office configuration for signs of an installed app and there was none.  For whatever reason, IE6 is incompatible with win2000 bottles and Outlook 2003 is incompatible with win98 bottles.

So much for Outlook 2003.  A quick google also confirmed my findings.

So what else?  I installed UltraEdit, Quicken, and Paintshop Pro under Crossover Office and they appear to be functional.  I also installed OpenOffice 2.0 which took a little bit of googling and trial and error.  Basically an app called alien is able to convert RPM (for the Redhat Linux variety) files into DEB (for the Debian Linux variety) files which can then be installed straight away on Xandros.

For printers I have a Brother 1440 laser and an HP Deskjet 990 Cxi both served off of a Linksys EFSP42 2 port printserver/4 port switch. I was able to (sort of) print to the laser through a Samba share on my windows desk top, but some apps (firefox) fouled up the printouts.

I decided to google a bit and see if I couldn’t print directly to the print served printers.  It took a little digging, but I got both printers working.

I was also able to get the PokerStars client application running under Crossover Office.  One strange thing that I have yet to figure out is why the icons on the desktop and the start menu refuse to work.  I was able to create a shortcut staight to the executable, which works, but instead of the normal icon, I have a blue gear (looks like a KDE thing) — oh well!

Bottom line is that while a linux desktop has come a long way since I last monkeyed around with it, it’s still not quite there for people who rely on Outlook 2003.  I would bet there are other apps that would not work right under CxOffice yet.  Hopefully the folks at CodeWeaver can iron out the last of the kinks.

Just replaced the PSU on a neighbors Shuttle (SK41G) pc. This was causing a 5-10 minute delay between the time when the start button was pushed and the pc started coming to life. A quick test with a full-size ATX PSU confirmed the PSU was the culprit. A google showed that Shuttle PSUs have gone bad in a few other cases, and just this morning a colleague mentioned a similar problem…and wouldn’t you know it, he has a Shuttle! The replacement arrived today and all is well.

Here is the old (click for lable close-up)…

…and here is the new (slightly bigger, both physically and capacity-wise)…

They’re nice little boxes, but I’ll stick with normal mini-ATX and ATX towers for the PCs I build.

I would like to thank buckrey who posted these notes on how to go about setting up mini_sendmail to allow mail to be sent for things like user registration, etc..

While this is not a “How-to”, I will at least try to hit the high points of getting a WordPress instance up and running on an old box that I recently “inherited” from my father-in-law. The Hardware The box is a Dell Dimension V350 — a Pentium II, 350 MHz machine with 256MB RAM and two hard drives 8 GB and 60 GB ( I added the second). Basically a decent box to run as Unix server (even though it was pretty pokey when it was trying to run Windows 2000). The Operating System I chose to use OpenBSD version 3.7 as the operating system for this project for a few reasons:

• Secure by default
• PHP and MySQL readily available for install
• I’ve dabbled with Open BSD before and am enamored with its simplicity

Configuration Open BSD is a fairly straight forward install. Your main choices involve partition sizes and which parts of the OS to install. I opted not to install games or anything involving X — don’t need a GUI for a server. The partition sizes used were:

• / 80 MB
• (swap) 300 MB
• /usr 2 GB
• /tmp 100 MB
• /home ~5.5 GB (the remainder of the 8 GB drive)
• /var ~60GB (the whole 60 GB drive)

The OS install is followed by the typical afterboot tasks like creating a regular user, adding the cd-drive to /etc/fstab, enabling httpd (i.e. Apache), disabling root logins via ssh, etc. . Installing PHP and MySQL is a snap using the pkg_add command and specifying the ftp location of the package. pkg_add takes care of the dependencies and provides instructions on any manual steps that might be required. The packes I explicitly added were:

• php4-core-4.3.11
• php4-mysql-4.3.11
• mysql-server-4.0.23p1

A paper on OAMP (OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server setup and web page on setting up a mysql database server on OpenBSD provide useful information on getting all the parts working together while leaving apache in its default mode of running in a “chroot’ed” environment, and some additional steps to “batten-down-the-hatches,” as it were. The final step of installing WordPress was a breeze — just follow the simple and very brief instructions and it just worked (this post is proof of that :-) ).