Migrating to Blogger

Previously I had been using Google Sites to host www.ryv.id.au. Sites is great, don't get me wrong, however the main purpose of my webpage is to host this blog and I don't think that sites do it well. For example, it doesn't list the entries in date order, rather in alphabetical order on the left hand side. While this is OK for a webpage, it makes it difficult for a blog oriented site to be easily navigated. My other webpage - www.zenpiper.com has a similar issue, only I also have other content on there not so easily migrated to Blogger.

It's horses for courses naturally. I've used Blogger previously and been reasonably happy with it. I'll stick with it for now and review what's happening with Google Sites as I go. Naturally, as a Google Reseller, I'm trying to keep up with it to the best of my ability to offer it to my valued clients.

AB out.

Adventures with OpenBSD - OpenBSD 5.0 on Sun Blade 1500

The scenario:

Installation of OpenBSD 5.0 on an Sun Blade 1500. I've replaced the default XVR-600 piece of proprietary junk video card with a Sun PGX-64 PCI Video Graphics card that uses the mach64 chipset for rendering things. Instantly I had a much nicer console and a far more workable X configuration. The only trick was getting the bloody thing to use 1280x1024 with 24bit resolution on my 19" Dell monitor. Here are the notes from the exercise:

Default installation
man afterboot

Dell E198FP Sync rates:

• 30 kHz to 81 kHz (automatic)
• 56 Hz to 76 Hz

Make sure to copy the above into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and also add:
Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth    24
                SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes   "1280x1024"
        EndSubSection
EndSection
- to force it to use 1280x1024

Add to .profile: PKG_PATH=http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/OpenBSD/5.0/packages/`machine -a`/

Installing Fluxbox (to play with more than anything):

pkg_add -i -vv fluxbox feh

Make sure to add exec /usr/local/bin/startfluxbox to .xinitrc by doing:

$ cat "exec /usr/local/bin/startfluxbox" > .xinitrc

Also do this to .xsession so startx grabs it straight away:

$ cat "exec /usr/local/bin/startfluxbox" > .xsession

pkg_add -i -vv midori -> lightweight browser, and tends to install a billion dependencies (mostly media playing type stuff which isn't bad)
pkg_add -i -vv firefox36
pkg_add -i -vv mousepad (lightweight text editor)
pkg_add -i -vv filezilla (FTP and stuff)
pkg_add -i -vv goffice (some kind of office thing - need to examine it more closely)
pkg_add -i -vv ristretto (basic image editing and viewing)
pkg_add -i -vv epdfview (PDF viewing)
pkg_add -i -vv conky (for checking out the system loads)
pkg_add -i -vv eterm (my favourite terminal program)

Note: fluxbox menus need a lot of work - I've deleted/commented out a *lot* of stuff to clean this all up.

pkg_add -u (check for any updates or errata)

Also look at this : http://www.gabsoftware.com/tips/tutorial-install-gnome-desktop-and-gnome-display-manager-on-openbsd-4-8/ for using Gnome and GDM

Further adventures with OpenBSD - XFCE vs Gnome

So continuing the great adventure - recently whenever I've used Gnome there is a string of "Starting file access" or something similar that appears in multiple tabs down the bottom. This continues endlessly and the load on my Blade 1500 gets up to about 5 which is unacceptable. So I hit the net and looked into using something different. I found a great blog (which I neglected to bookmark or make any other notes about)  that explained a bit about how to do it. Basically I did this:

# pkg_add -i -vv pkg_mgr

which is an easy way to do searches and install large number of packages and then go to X11 and pick all the XFCE packages. How easy is that? Download and install and off you go. The load on my machine is:

angus@blade:~$ w
11:43AM  up 13 days, 21:04, 3 users, load averages: 0.71, 0.63, 0.59

With 792MB of RAM in use (of 2048MB) and this is with Firefox running while I write this entry. 

Overall I find XFCE to be more responsive than Gnome - which is hardly surprising and for the basic features I require it looks quite nice and drives quite well. 

I do tend to find that the machine struggles when I'm looking at various webpages on the net - it doesn't handle processor intensive work all that well - and after all, why should it? This computer is old and does only have 1GHz processors so it will go slow. As a basic server type machine - running with the encrypted file systems and the like with SSH access in, it's working quite well.

Configuring an Ubuntu server under Microsoft Hyper-V

It's fairly straightforward to make this happen. Do a basic config of the system and then:

$ sudo vi /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
    & add below lines
hv_vmbus
hv_storvsc
hv_blkvsc
hv_netvsc

Save the file, then: 

$ sudo update-initramfs –u

$ sudo reboot

$ sudo ifconfig -a

$sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces
    Add below lines for dhcp:
    Auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

    Add below lines for static IP:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.0.0.100 [IP address]
netmask 255.255.255.0 [Subnet]
gateway 10.0.0.1 [Default Gateway]

Now restart networking service & reboot:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
$ sudo reboot

And you will be good to go!

Further adventures with OpenBSD - Encrypting Files systems

So I decided to create an encrypted folder on my workstation to use as a storage device for work related files (which typically have passwords etc located in them). After some trial and error I found the way to do it. Blog entries and the like that reference this material mention using the svnd0 vnode device for the encryption but it doesn't work. I'm not sure if this is an OpenBSD 5 peculiarity or something to do with my Sparc install but I eventually sorted it out.

Note: do all commands as the root user - it's a lot easier.

I created the sparse file to be encrypted:
    # dd if=/dev/zero of=/location/of/secret/file/.cryptfile bs=1024 count=1024000

Note that it's 1GB in size and has a preceeding "." so it's at least a little bit hidden from a casual ls search.

I have to mount .cryptfile somewhere so I created a folder for that too:

    # mkdir /media/crypt (or wherever you'd like to put it)

I have to check what vnodes are available:

    # vnconfig -l
vnd0: not in use
vnd1: not in use
vnd2: not in use
vnd3: not in use

I can choose any of these to associate with my virtual encrypted device. I will use vnd0. Using vnconfig again:

    # sudo vnconfig -ck -v vnd0 .cryptfile
Encryption key: (use something good)
vnd0: 1048576000 bytes on .cryptfile

OK so now we need to create a file system on our device (which is only a single partition) so we need to newfs the "c" slice as this is the whole disk:

    #  sudo newfs /dev/vnd0c
/dev/rvnd0c: 1000.0MB in 2048000 sectors of 512 bytes
5 cylinder groups of 202.47MB, 12958 blocks, 25984 inodes each
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
 32, 414688, 829344, 1244000, 1658656,

So now to mount our encrypted filesystem to store our secret files!

    # mount /dev/vnd0c /media/crypt

Probably a good idea to make it usable for me:

    # chown -R angus:wheel /media/crypt

And we're off and racing:

# df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a     1005M   42.2M    913M     4%    /
/dev/wd0k     42.8G    1.0G   39.7G     2%    /home
/dev/wd0d      3.9G    224K    3.7G     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0f      2.0G    450M    1.4G    24%    /usr
/dev/wd0g     1005M    135M    820M    14%    /usr/X11R6
/dev/wd0h      8.6G    1.9G    6.3G    23%    /usr/local
/dev/wd0j      2.0G    2.0K    1.9G     0%    /usr/obj
/dev/wd0i      2.0G    2.0K    1.9G     0%    /usr/src
/dev/wd0e      7.9G   42.7M    7.4G     1%    /var
/dev/vnd0c     984M    2.0K    935M     0%    /media/crypt

I'll be re-creating this whole thing again soon so watch out for any updates or errata.

Check out: http://www.backwatcher.org/writing/howtos/obsd-encrypted-filesystem.html for some handy mounting/unmounting scripts.

FreeNAS Upgrade from i386 to x64

To get reporting working properly do the following:

SSH to the box (or use the console)

[root@freenas] ~# service collectd stop
    Stopping collectd.
    Waiting for PIDS: 4002.
[root@freenas] ~# find /data -name "*.rrd" -exec rm -rf {} \;
[root@freenas] ~# find /var/db/collectd -name "*.rrd" -exec rm -rf {} \;
[root@freenas] ~# service collectd start
    Starting collectd.

... and reporting will be fixed.

FreeNAS version is FreeNAS-8.0.2-RELEASE-amd64 (8288)

*BSD vs Linux for Home Server

I have a few simple needs for my home server - it needs to be stable, functional on older hardware (P4 2GHz with 1 or 2 GB of RAM) and run a few simple applications:

• rtorrent (for... ahem... legitimate torrent requirements)
• irssi - the bestest IRC client (and the one I've spent ages getting a nice config file for)
• screen (for teh awesomeness!)
• SSH - for remote work, and for sshfs so I can rsync and backup data remotely
• and a bit of storage space - 100GB is nice
• nagios - monitoring work sites as required
• DHCP
• DNS

Currently I'm running Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS on a P4 3GHz USDT HP that has a noisy fan in it and I'm going to migrate back to my Dell P4 2GHz box that I was running before. It has a slower processor, is quiet and reliable. It's also more power efficient than the current one. I've been considering getting my hands on an Atom powered box or the like with very low power requirements for home. After all this server really doesn't have to do a lot or work - it just needs to chug quietly away and provide the basic services I need. So why change?

Well several reasons I guess. Security is the big one. Reliability is the next one. A rolling distribution would be handy too - one with easy, in place, headless upgrades.

Most Linux variants will support the apps I listed, as will FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD, my two preferred BSD variants (even though I've had great success with OpenBSD on my Sun Blade - see earlier posts). I'm thinking FreeBSD may be the option to go with, so I'm playing with it under VMware Player at the moment. DragonFly's HAMMER files system is mighty attractive though, so I'm thinking very carefully about this choice. I'll keep notes on my adventure as it goes forward.