Server shenanigans

So Ubuntu is utterly refus­ing to install and I’m scared to use Gen­too, which was vaguely the next resort. And I’ve had enough of Cen­tOS’ absurd pack­age man­age­ment sys­tem (really, RPM does make things impos­si­bly dif­fi­cult com­pared to apt-based sys­tems). I’m going to try installing FreeBSD tomor­row and com­pil­ing bits and pieces, because that’s how metro stayed online all those years and whilst I don’t have Dale’s skill, I don’t doubt that the method­ol­ogy was sound. Plus, FreeBSD is one more envi­ron­ment to test this project on — a ded­i­cated server we were vaguely offered a few months back is run­ning NetBSD, so it’d be good to begin scratch­ing together a hand­ful of skills in that area, just in case!

On the plus side, I got all sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tion stuff (esp. Samba, which can be a lot more dif­fi­cult than per­haps it should be at times) worked out last week (i.e. the sys­tem was nearly per­fect, but for being utterly unable to install even SRPM pack­ages of a more recent Python ver­sion), and Michael went through installing every­thing with me at work… we had to bat­tle Win­dows a lit­tle there, but even it relented. So close. Then I’ll spend heaps of time cut­ting lay­outs to markup and see­ing them work­ing, and non-Youthworks time tak­ing Satchmo for a spin (which will hope­fully lend itself to a cer­tain appli­ca­tion very nicely). The lovely thing about all this is I need Django to work for CYIADA, so I’m sup­ported in get­ting it up and run­ning, but then have enough ‘spare’ hours in the week that I can engage in free­lance projects that ulti­mately mean I know what’s going on with CYIADA and am mildly more com­pe­tent to make minor mod­i­fi­ca­tions as required accordingly.

Some of those projects might even feed back into the project, which would be a bonus — but even if they come to noth­ing, it’s worth­while for skills devel­op­ment alone.

# by Josh on July 29th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , ,
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I am what I am because Ubuntu is not

I got sick of wanky pseudo-African named-operating systems.

Actu­ally, that’s a lie, but I’m feel­ing a lit­tle vit­ri­olic (oxy­moron?). Ubuntu didn’t work at all, and of a sud­den Cen­tOS did. It’s not quite as pol­ished but I could grow to love it (maybe). I just need to look past this whole RPM thing, which really is ugly com­pared to the breadth and depth of apt options avail­able. IMO, of course. And the whole ports gig just scares me so I’m gonna stay away from FreeBSD here for a while longer (until this one breaks in another two years?)

I’d for­got­ten how much work I’d put into mak­ing Samba shares behave as well as they had been for the last for­ever, too. And was con­vinced there was noth­ing of value left on the com­puter (I didn’t delete the home direc­to­ries, just in case… that was really easy because they’re even on a phys­i­cally sep­a­rate vol­ume, it was basi­cally less effort to just leave them there) and con­se­quently (yet again) deleted a MySQL data­base with StuffOf­Value™ in it. In this case a CYIADA sur­vey data­base I’d built because there were no other options avail­able and (you prob­a­bly guessed it) I hadn’t sorted out host­ing by IT at work yet.

So the aim now is to setup a sim­i­larly solid server that’ll last me another two years, bar­ring hard­ware upgrades (this thing desparately needs more RAM even though it’s got half a gig – I have no idea where it all goes). This time around it’ll be more web-production-esque in its role, which basi­cally means it’ll have more than just being a quiet Samba PDC and file server and web dump­ing ground on its plate, at least until every­thing I’ve got planned for it today reaches matu­rity, or my sit­u­a­tion changes to the point that pay­ing for a VPS or real ded­i­cated server some­where else is a viable option. Loki does, indeed, work quite well, but I can’t screw with it quite as much as some things make me want to (not that I’d want to do that to Loki… in between cat­a­strophic hard­ware fail­ure it’s amaz­ingly sta­ble and the lack of gen­eral screwing-around-ness is prob­a­bly a big part of that! Prob­a­bly… :P)

No aspi­ra­tions sur­round­ing the idea of a media server this time around. Though there’s a pos­si­bil­ity I’ll look at maybe build­ing a ter­abyte RAID server later this year, which would mean rethink­ing whisper’s role some­what. It’d prob­a­bly be relo­cated to down­stairs (it’s cooler there) and replaced by a case with bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion and requir­ing bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion. The EPIA board I’ve got isn’t pas­sively cooled, but I reckon it can deal with get­ting toasty that much more because it’s got a fan stuck to it. It’s a bor­der­line fan require­ment, any­way — the hard dri­ves get hot­ter than the proces­sor (high­est I’ve seen the dri­ves is about 62° C, the proces­sor would only hit 55, tops) on forty-something degree Syd­ney days. If the stor­age upgrade is called for I’d prob­a­bly look at get­ting some­thing with a bit more grunt though, just because if the space requires bet­ter ven­ti­la­tion then that lets me stop con­strain­ing the sys­tem power accord­ing to temperature!

Any­way. Now I’m a Cen­tOS kid. Which makes me feel kinda dirty inside because of the whole Promi­nent North Amer­i­can Upstream Provider All In Title Case issue, but I think I can live with myself for the time being.

# by Josh on February 8th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Asterisk

Actu­ally got an Aster­isk server func­tion­ing today at work. It’s pretty straight­for­ward when all the pack­ages are there… Asterisk@Home goes some way to doing all that for you. For those fer­vently par­tial to any par­tic­u­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion — or morally/ethically opposed to CentOS’s pack­ag­ing tac­tics… I can see why peo­ple may be, but don’t have those reser­va­tions myself –, let your fury be abated. There is a plain tar.gz file that has a script and some other stuff that basi­cally means you can install it on what­ever plat­form you like, depen­den­cies aside.

Depen­den­cies, inci­den­tally, were the main rea­son it didn’t get installed on a Debian sys­tem as orig­i­nally planned. Pacific Internet’s apt repos­i­tory seems to have been borked the last few days, so there were miss­ing pack­ages and pack­ages in the data­base but unable to be installed and all other kinds of junk… When it got to the point I couldn’t even get some­thing to install from CPAN because of lower-level depen­den­cies in Perl itself, I kind of gave up and started down­load­ing Asterisk@Home. That was yes­ter­day. I can­celled the down­load because Pacific was being too slow for my lik­ing (Tel­stra Cable has spoilt me with down­stream), and this morn­ing before head­ing in I down­loaded the dis­tri­b­u­tion from Source­forge in about 10 min­utes. Bad check­sum. Down­loaded again. Burnt to CD. Still faster than it would have been to down­load at work. Ah well.

I didn’t get in til 9.30 because I was burn­ing CDs etc, and had a func­tional sys­tem call­ing between PCs and with voice­mail, recep­tion mes­sage, etc., by 11.11 (I noted the time, it being a sem­i­nal moment in my per­sonal VoIP-using his­tory, even if I did cheat and use a pre-packaged ver­sion!). Good stuff.

Also, if you’re going to use Asterisk@Home in Aus­tralia, install the Open­Voice IVR prompts and record­ings. It’s much bet­ter than lis­ten­ing to that Amer­i­can voice which was dri­ving us nuts even whilst test­ing :P Hav­ing said that, you may need to restart the server when chang­ing voice files… ours was doing some weird thing where it seems to have cached the old files in voice­mail IVR prompts. The voice would be chiefly Aus­tralian, but for a “one” sound. Might’ve been the inflex­ion (falling “one” or neu­tral “one” instead of ris­ing “one”), but I didn’t think they had par­tic­u­larly con­cerned them­selves with that when writ­ing most PBX/voicemail sys­tems… could be wrong. Any­way redi­al­ing the voice­mail exten­sion a few times seemed to help resolve things. Bizarre.

The Aster­isk box, to bor­row a term (Hi Steve :P), is run­ning with 256MB of RAM — but is sit­ting per­ilously close to swap whilst run­ning. It doesn’t help that it leaves two instances of mpg123 run­ning in the back­ground for hold music, as well as vsftpd (seri­ously, who’d use that on a tele­phony server? If you need to backup voice­mail, write a cron job to copy the files to a remote server. Bingo, no FTP server required! Grr.) and a hand­ful of other crap. Any­way, it’s prob­a­bly going to get more mem­ory before it moves into pro­duc­tion use. There are two Fritz! ISDN cards in it, but they haven’t been set up yet. Any­one seen a site about installing Fritz! cards with Aster­isk? All I’ve seen about them is that they need ker­nel recom­pi­la­tion for chan_capi stuff… and recom­pil­ing ker­nels has never struck me as par­tic­u­larly fun. (The few times I have tried, boot­load­ers have been unco-operative… i.e. I didn’t know what I was doing!)

# by Josh on December 21st, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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