Random Musings

OK, so I’m not the first to blog about this, however I’m using cobbler and puppet to automate the creation of VMs on my laptop for testing/staging purposes so I thought I’d blog about it here.

The aim is to use Cobbler to setup the base operating system and install puppet, then let Puppet take over and install and configure the rest of the system.

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Twitter has the latest updates on safe-proxy servers for those inside IRAN wishing to get out and publish about the current events.

Current list is as follows (19:48 on Monday 15th June 2009):

218.128.112.18:8080
218.206.94.132:808
218.253.65.99:808
219.50.16.70:8080

WHOIS reveals that these IP addresses are NOT inside IRAN and therefore are unlikely to be shut down as part of the signal jamming referred to in a bbc post found @ http://bit.ly/11YBNo

If you want to help, search for #Iranelection @ http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23Iranelection

There are calls for a DDOS on the Iranian Gov’t Servers. I think this is a bad idea as it is using fire to fight fire IMHO.

[UPDATE]

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22Functioning%20Iran%22  <– follow this tag for the list of functioning IRAN proxies.

Just a quick post…

In the last two parts of this series I stated I’d be using Ethernet over Powerline (aka HomePlug) as the backbone for my media system.

I currently own two 14Mbps units and tests have rapidly shown that this is nowhere near good enough.  Looks like I’ll have to upgrade to the 200Mbps units once I get paid and hope that it makes a difference.  If it doesn’t, I think I’m going to have to go down the route of Wireless-AP’s flashed with OpenWRT and acting as bridge devices to get the DHCP/TFTP working for the media directors.

Hmmm, PXE over a flakey wireless CX – not good… (

In part one of this series, I outlined LinuxMCE and how amazing it was providing Home Cinema, VoIP Telephony, CCTV and home automation in one system for the price of a download and a few hours work.  This article will help those who, like me, live in rented accomodation or cannot ask their local electrician to come and channel cabling ducts into the walls for some other reason, yet need to have a solid network cable running throughout the house.

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I’ve been playing around with Home Automation and trying to get my audio/video around the house without honey-combing the walls for the last few years with varying degrees of luck and in this time I’ve looked at a number of solutions including proprietary hardware (too expensive!!), Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition (expensive and it runs on Windows…) and MythTV/Music Player Daemon (free, but not always the easiest to get it working!

Two years ago, I found Pluto Home – a commercial solution that had an open-source base and ran on Debian.  I played with it for a bit as the feature set was amazing (TV, Video, Audio and CCTV anywhere in the house as well as integrated VoIP telephony and some really cool stuff) but I ran out of spare time to explore it further.  I’ve started to look into Home Automation and Media again and this time, instead of using Pluto Home, I’ve decided to settle for LinuxMCE. It’s based on pluto home and Ubuntu and there’s been a lot of development since I was using Pluto…

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“The French national police force, the Gendarmerie Nationale, has spoken about their migration away from the Windows platform to Linux. Estimated to have already saved the force 50 Million Euros, the migration is due to be completed on all 90,000 workstations by 2015. Of the move, Lt. Col. Guimard had this comment: ‘”Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users,” said Lt. Col. Guimard. “Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”‘”

LOL @ “Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”‘”

OK, so I tried to run the upgrade last night and I’ve ended up with a few issues. This could be my fault, however I did follow the instructions found on the debian website and had to resolve multiple dependencies.

The minor issues I’ve encountered:

1. slocate appears to have been removed and replaced with mlocate.
2. Apache is complaining about NameVirtualHost not being set anywhere for both *:80 and *:443, yet the config files show otherwise

The Major issues I’ve discovered:

1. MySQL Server was uninstalled as part of the upgrade. The only way I have been able to re-install it is to run dpkg –set-selections < packages.list where packages.list was the file I created using dpkg –set-selections as part of the upgrade.
2. BackupPC requires complete analysis of the config file to work out which parameters have not been defined in the old config so it will run.
3. OcsInventory (admittedly installed from source so not a Debian problem) causes Apache2 to fail on startup owing to a missing perl module.

The solutions:

1. Install mlocate and run updatedb
2. Re-install OCSInventory and restart Apache2
3. update the backuppc-config file using Meld to import the new variables and the backuppc wiki to migrate from v2 to v3.

Wasn’t that fun? P

I’ve been using BackupPC for the last year to securely backup servers to a remote location over Rsync and SSH, however I recently stumbled across an issue with backing up the SVN root directory on an SVN server.

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One of my previous posts concerned how to install Nagios3 from source on Debian Etch.  One of the comments I recieved was that you should generally use the packages available for install.  I agree with this entirely, however there’s no challenge in just using the packages and I’ve found myself getting lazy when it comes to installing stuff recently, so here’s how to install the excellent Puppet configuration management engine from source on Debian Etch.

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I’m currently configuring a cluster to provide high availability web-hosting.

The main issue we’ve experienced is with ensuring that PHP sessions are maintained across the web-servers without having to recode all the sites that are contained on them.

The answer appears to be session_mysql – this is a php module that replaces the “file”session manager with a MySQL backend. Read the rest of this entry »