Nginx

Must play with this HTTP server/load-balancer/mail proxy/bundle of awe­some some­time soon. Looks like a pretty awe­some option for VPS envi­ron­ments and other places where there isn’t heaps of spare resources going around! My cupboard-bound SSH oasis and occa­sional web­server is, of course, a likely can­di­date… but I’m a tad con­cerned I’ll screw myself over with PHP. Not because it par­tic­u­larly gets used for that (there’s like… a few wikis and a hand­ful of lines of PHP code eas­ily replaced by some­thing else that get semi-regular atten­tion) but mostly for the “just in case” I wanna test run some­thing. And yeah, I know, that’s what vir­tu­alised stuff should be for… but I still haven’t quite caught up to that. I’ve got an Ubuntu thing run­ning in a vir­tual PC instance on the com­puter I use most of the time, but it just doesn’t cut it for actu­ally try­ing to test some­thing out with, you know, other users and real Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity. In other news, can-we-have-IPv6-moar-plx? Just because it’s absurd to have to pay more to run real SSL on ded­i­cated IPs when there is SO MUCH SPACE just wait­ing for us to broaden our hori­zons and start to fill it. I’m not heaps fussed if pre-Windows XP users can’t use it, actu­ally, because they’ve likely got big­ger secu­rity prob­lems on their hands from their network-connected 10-year-old OS than any reg­u­lar web inter­ac­tion is likely to give them, prop­erly secured or not — that is, even if their web traf­fic is secured, their desk­top is prob­a­bly a bot­net zom­bie with key­log­gers and tro­jans abounding.

# by Josh on May 20th, 2008 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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60k

This image makes 60,000 indexed items. A fair whack of that would be email, but far out that’s a lot of infor­ma­tion. (It’s not just a count of files on a sys­tem, that’s just indexed doc­u­ments in my home dir, projects work­space, and email accounts)

New lap­top arrives Mon­day morn­ing, and I’m try­ing to decide if I even want to move every­thing off this desk­top or not! The lap­top has half a TB of disc space across 2 dri­ves (17″ mon­ster), so I’m con­sid­er­ing it. I pur­chased it as a desk­top replace­ment sys­tem and it is quite capa­ble of that (specs at end of post)! The desk­top pro­vides a good backup should the lap­top die/get stolen/run over by a bus, but at present the data is organ­ised to be used, not archived.

By “used”, of course, I mean that lib­er­ally dis­or­gan­ised but most-recently-used-on-top sort of struc­ture we fall into so eas­ily. So I have a spot of sort­ing to do to get every­thing onto the laptop.

My last com­puter still has some stuff I’d like to get off it (par­tic­u­larly uni work… to the crit­ics, yes, I do still go to uni!) but it’s been in at Youth­works not doing much since we moved offices, but heavy enough I haven’t both­ered bring­ing it home again, since late last year.

The prob­lem with desk­tops in par­tic­u­lar is that they aren’t worth sell­ing for their poten­tial use­ful­ness. My several-years-old com­puter (2.4GHz/768MB/somethingsomething… Ubuntu) in at Youth­works could maybe just sell for $350 given a clue­less enough eBayer. My cur­rent desk­top (no great slouch, AMD64 X2 4200+/2GB/7600GS) would be worth about the same to some­one who knew what they were talk­ing about… or per­haps $750 on eBay!

Even so — it’s use­ful to have spare machines ‘just in case’ (for pro­duc­tion stuff espe­cially). I’d love to be able to swap those two desk­tops for lap­tops of sim­i­lar vin­tage, but it’s just never going to be cost-effective. When peo­ple get rid of lap­tops, it’s because they suck (falling apart/general abuse, crap bat­tery life, rub­bish specs to start with, etc.). Not so with desk­tops, wherein most faults are redeemable at min­i­mal cost. And even that min­i­mal cost is often negated by the fact that there’s so much in the way of ‘spare’ parts around the place!

# by Josh on November 26th, 2007 Tags: ,
| 1 Comment »

Absurdly cheap lighting console

If any­one has a spare grand sit­ting around they feel like spend­ing this lovely evening, there’s a just-serviced LSC Axiom 36/72 light­ing con­sole going on eBay in a bit over 3 ½ hours. In Mel­bourne, but with road­case included. I’d buy it, but I’m broke… some­thing to do with not being able to do any real work on account of try­ing to get *nix setup for­ever. Ubuntu is per­fect, but for the fact that it wouldn’t con­sider boot­ing for me for some rea­son. Blame VIA/EPIA for their clone low-power hard­ware, methinks.

# by Josh on August 1st, 2007 Tags: , , ,
| 2 Comments »

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: , , , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

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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Ubuntu makes me sad

I don’t even par­tic­u­larly blame it, but it’s not work­ing on whis­per (faith­fully serv­ing in a cup­board since early-2005) any­more. It was run­ning 5.10 (I think) for yonks and then today I decided it might be easier/cleaner to pull the plug and re-install than just change the apt sources for a third time (or how­ever many it’s been)

So I down­loaded 6.10 (hence the tor­rent post) and it didn’t work.

Fine. I down­loaded 6.06 LTS (the, you know, meant-to-be-überstable-and-longlasting release) and it hangs load­ing the ker­nel. No ker­nel panic mes­sage, it just gets stuck.

This is annoying.

I’m basi­cally going to rebuild this entire server for Django’s sake, because it’s so use­ful for non-programmers like me to build things that work. This has been an inter­est­ing week at church because a whole bunch of new things started/old things restarted and finally I’m in a posi­tion to eval­u­ate where we can use tech­nol­ogy from an “insider” stand­point with regards to what I’m being paid to do at Youth­works.

I’ve got two small­ish (with poten­tial for mas­sive exten­sion) apps that I want to build in under two days for ongo­ing inter­nal use (one for TACKLES, another for my Switch small group this year) which will essen­tially form pro­to­types for revision/replacement as appro­pri­ate for use in a CYIADA global con­text once we get a pro­gram­mer on board (God will­ing some­time soon! I’m meet­ing with some­one who will hope­fully be help­ful in this regard on Fri­day, please be pray­ing!) and make some more con­crete deci­sions about archi­tec­ture. I can draw flow­charts until there’s noth­ing left to flow but that doesn’t get busi­ness logic written!

I’m think­ing the Ubuntu issue will be some stu­pid hard­ware thing that will go away once I take the com­puter apart. It prob­a­bly needs a bit of a clean, any­way. I just so don’t have time to spend on sysad­miny type stuff these days, only no-one else at work will/is inter­ested in doing it, which is rather annoy­ing — there’s free host­ing, but it’s seri­ously the most vanilla host­ing envi­ron­ment you’re likely to find any­where. It’s a CPanel/WHM gig with zero redun­dancy, zero back­ups, PHP4 only, and blah blah blah no-one cares. Generic with a cap­i­tal G set in Times New Roman. There is, of course, lit­tle inter­est in any­thing using a non-.Net plat­form. I’d actu­ally quite hap­pily use MSSQL, but ASP.Net is, by all reports, just gross from a web stan­dards per­spec­tive. And whilst I’m slowly being de-radicalised in that regard (par­tially because I am car­ing less about stan­dards and more about acces­si­bil­ity, which is bad long term any­way, and also because my view­points are becom­ing less rad­i­cal as main­stream moves towards where I am now! CSS is the norm, and pure content/presentation sep­a­rated sites are prob­a­bly rep­re­sent­ing 50% of site refreshes at the minute), I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel that much just yet.

Nor should I be.

*soap­box off*

# by Josh on February 8th, 2007 Tags: , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Intoxication

I just tried Wine again for the first time in about twelve months (last attempt was with eTax, use­less IE-dependent thing that it is, last year. After a bit of con­fig­ging it worked but couldn’t sub­mit because of that depen­dency… it saved a data file I could sub­mit with Win­dows, though) and am astounded.

After zero-config, installers work mag­i­cally, 3d engines func­tion, and every­thing is gen­er­ally incred­i­ble. I read this on someone’s blog ear­lier today: “with that I was able to install the lat­est Wine (0.9.18 at the time of this writ­ing). This comes with bet­ter sup­port for HL2 and WoW.” and con­se­quently was afraid the ver­sion in non-backports Ubuntu would be ancient, etcetera, and gen­er­ally useless.

No, the author is cor­rect in say­ing “bet­ter support” — there is intrin­si­cally fan­tas­tic sup­port for pretty much every­thing. It’s incred­i­ble. Now I’ve just got to get some time in which to play var­i­ous games. Linux, appar­ently, is no longer a bar­rier to entry, and Loki Games (R.I.P.) would face an ever-diminishing chal­lenge as com­pata­bil­ity lay­ers keep grow­ing in their sheer brilliance.

I’ve yet to try pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, but am con­tent with hav­ing ten­ta­tively embraced the gamer side of geek for one week­end. I’d love to give Dreamweaver a whirl, but am unlikely to be doing enough devel­op­ment work to jus­tify it for the next cou­ple of months. MS Office would be a pleas­ant addi­tion to the reper­toire, though OpenOf­fice is excel­lent for most appli­ca­tions. I’d never go back to using Word for prepar­ing real doc­u­ments, but per­haps for things requir­ing collaboration/versioning it’s the best choice. I’d prob­a­bly get MS Office for cre­at­ing Pow­er­point templates/editing other people’s work before I had any real need for it myself, so these things are still pretty unnec­es­sary. It’s just fan­tas­tic to think that it is, all of a sud­den, a possibility.

The irony of all this is that I’m wax­ing lyri­cal about closed-source apps when the actual intent of this post is to extoll the bril­liance of F/OSS’s progress. Purists would argue oth­er­wise… but they’re wrong :-)

# by Josh on September 10th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
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