Just some quick links!

This links describes how to manage multiple databases with Capistrano. That’s not why I picked it though. I liked it because it shows the “<<: *” syntax of yaml.

And a repository of Ubuntu Hardy Heron debs for mod_rails/Phusion passenger. At this time I installed mod_rails via rubygems. But if the guys at brighbox make the package so it builds/installs the Apache module automatically (without human intervention and pressing Y two times) I will install that one. Much, much nicer to use with Puppet.

I was thinking about putting together a new low-energy VT-enabled HTPC. So I can use it to watch video’s, play my music on it, use it for testing purposes, put freebsd on it and a lot more. That’s why I want the VT extension. So I can install KVM/Xen with all the goodies

But, the trick question: what components? Pffff, I don’t know anything about hardware anymore so I had to brush-up my knowledge about this stuff. After reading a lot of forum posts, reviews and the lot, I came up with the following hardware components:

Case: Antec Fusion case

A nice looking case with a lcd display with Linux drivers for it available (I think). And also an infrared receiver. And the price is not too high like some other cases.

Motherboard: Gigabyte vs. Asus

I’ve got two options: The Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H or the Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI. I also thought about a similar Asrock motherboard. Because they use very little energy (so I’ve read). But it’s a bit of a hassle to find a dealer who sells these boards. So I think I’ll stick with the former two.

Why one of these? They both have the new AMD 780G/SB700 chipset which supports full HD hardware encoding. So if I’m gonna us it as a HTPC it does it work descent.

CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4450e

Low power usage and only a couple of euro’s more than it’s brother the 4050. I think it supports amd-v/svm, but it’s not too obvious if you read the AMD site. So I hope I got it right

Cooler: Scythe Ninja mini

I want the system to be passively cooled. And this is the best small heatsink I could find.

Memory: 2 x 2GB

I don’t care what kind of memory goes into it. As long if it’s enough to support a couple of VM’s.

Hard disk: 32GB SSD

This one is hard! Is this worth the 160 euro’s? Well it is fast, silent and reliable! And it’s enough for DomU + some VM’s. All my  data is gonna be saved on another (network) diskdrive. But still….

I was surfing for some ticketing / project management software and it returned the following result:

• Sifter
• Beanstalk
• Redmine
• Unfuddle
• Lighthouse
• JIRA
• 16 bugs
• Bugzilla
• Fogbugz
• Trac

Especially Sifter looks really nice! But… it isn’t open source. So too bad. I went with Redmine: open source, ruby on rails and already a nice feature set!

A nice overview of bug/issue tracking systems can be found on wikipedia.

Today I’ve installed Phusion passenger on one of our servers. I wanted Redmine for one of our projects so this seemede a nice opportunity to install it.

Installation was a breeze. For mod_rails as well Redmine.

So I was thinking: we have mod_rails installed, we could offer some rails hosting to attract new customers.

But I see three bears on the road with using mod_rails in a shared hosting environment.

1. Same user

Every mod_rails site runs on the same user I’ve spent hours on configuring fastcgi and suexec. But now every hosting custommer’s scripts run under their own user. Would be nice if mod_rails supported something like that.

2. Memory

I couldn’t find an option to limit the memory usage per mod_rails site. And I know how memory hungry rails can be

3. Aliases

Mod_rails doesn’t support host aliases. This is overcomable but feels like a hack. Wouldn’t it be nice if mod_rails supported aliases Pleeeeeeaaaaase?

Maybe I haven’t read the documentation to well and are my points useless In that case: please let me know!

I was reading a nice article on Ruby on Rails flesh messages. It linked to an article about styling message boxes with css.

I’m a real sucker for nice message boxes. If you are too: this is a must-read.

Don’t!

I first wondered why Ubuntu chose KVM instead of Xen. Well, now I now: because it’s a piece of crap. Well, maybe not Xen, but definitely the products that claim to “support” Xen.

I tried Ubuntu (error in virt-install), Debian Lenny (doesn’t support Dom0 hosts), Fedora (don’t remember what was wrong with that), OpenSuse (yast2 bug) and some others. And they all had some bug in it that prevented me from using virt-install and/or Xen in a nice manner.

I eventually got virt-install working on Ubuntu by installing it from source. The Ubuntu/debian version has been broken for the last couple of months. So finally I was reading to use Xen. Downloaded an iso. Figured out how to use the commandline options and then: an iso can’t be used with a para-virtualized guest. You have to have the VT cpu extension for it.

Well, that did it. I removed xen, shut down the computer and offered it for sale on a couple of marketplaces. My next plan: buy a new one with VT on board so I can use KVM.

Stupid open source!

Because I use Linux on my servers + on my daily desktop (work and private) now, I don’t have an OS to play around with anymore and f*ck up.

So I’ve installed FreeBSD (only in Virtualbox for now). And it worked! Last time I tried to install FreeBSd, it hang on some network-driver issue.

Why FreeBSD? Well, I’ve read some good things about the ports system and it really is nice how you can mix binary/source packages. What’s also nice, is that you can adjust the compile options for each package. Handy for suexec for example!

But why not Gentoo? I’ve tried Gentoo a couple of times. I even had it for a desktop for a while. But it kept giving conflicts between packages and everything is from source. So I find Gentoo a little bit too time consuming for a day-to-day use. Oh, and FreeBSD has a nice installer. Gentoo has not. And it the next version of FreeBSD there may be even a graphical installer! Thumbs up!

The first thing I did after I installed FreeBSD:

pkg_add -r portupgrade fpkg

And what I’ve learned so far: If you use the -P parameter with the port* utilities, it uses binary packages instead of the ports.

I took me a while to figure that one out I was looking for a pkginstall command, but I couldn’t find it. So after reading some docs, it looked like port* was the answer, only you must use different switces.

The second thing I did, was to get rid of the csh shell. What a piece of crap! I installed bash and configured my profile to use bash. After editing /etc/passwd and messing it all up, I found out there was a command to change shell chsh to the rescue.

When I’ve found out how installing packages all works and when I’ve messed up my system for the first time, I think I’m gonna install it on a real computer. Maybe even try FreeBSD with Gnome.

Because I’m had (yes, past tense) some issues with Flash player 9 on Ubuntu Hardy Herron, I was looking for some simple way to install Flash 10 on my installation. So I browsed the Ubuntu forums a bit and fout some howto’s. But they all involved some downloading and manual installing the Flash 10 Linux package. Yeah, that was a no-go for me. First of all because it were only some minor issues and because I’m lazy. And manually installing is sooooo 2005.

But then I thought: waaaait a minute, I can pull the same trick I did with ruby 1.8.7 and guessnet! The steps:

1. Copy this file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.list
2. Apt-get update
3. apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree (just to be save)
4. Add flashplugin-nonfree to /etc/apt/preferences (here’s the example how including ruby & guessnet)
5. apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
6. Restart firefox

Voila: flash 10

The benefits: no as much cpu-cycles waisted as with Flash 9 (still a lot more than with Flash in Windows) and I don’t have the problem anymore that flash sometimes hangs my browser when I leave a page with Flash on it. Oh, and sometimes Flash didn’t load: that’s solved too!

Since I’ve installed Ubuntu Hardy Herron I have this problem that the Glipper applet keeps crashing whenever I’ve started my Gnome desktop. When I add glipper to the panel again, it doesn’t crash anymore (for that session). I couldn’t find a solution, so I let it slide.

But, when I revisited Ubuntu launchpad today to search for the problem, a solution came up.

Someone was even so kindly to provide a deb with the fixed code. You can find that in the same bug report. Well, it really isn’t “fixed”. It’s just a workarround. But it works and it’s not annoying.

The workaround was really simple. Just add these two lines to the top of the glipper executable:

import time
time.sleep(8)

The glipper execuable in Ubuntu is located here: /usr/lib/glipper/glipper
I don’t know where it is in other distributions.

The default vpnc in Ubuntu comes without openssl support. Bugger… But with these few lines of code this is solved:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get build-dep vpnc
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
mkdir ~/src/vpnc -p
cd ~/src/vpnc
apt-get source vpnc
cd vpnc-*
dpkg-buildpackage
sudo dpkg -i ../vpnc*.deb

Et voila: vpnc with openssl!