Michael Wheeler

Paxton Holley – Google Gmail in the new Desktop theme

G-mail is a killer email client and provider and I couldn’t live without it (actually, I think I could, but it would be hard :P). I’ve been using G-mail since one year after it’s closed Beta trial and loved it from the start, so much that I have Google Apps just so I can get G-mail for my own domain. Only one thing is really sucking at the moment, Themes. Plain old G-mail allows for crazy, funky and cool themes to be applied, while Google Apps / Hosted gets the standard theme. This has been like this for a large amount of months now, and I’m getting extremely jealous of standard G-mail.

If anyone knows a way around this (User scripts or other voodoo magic), without forwarding all my email to a standard G-mail account, please leave me a comment, because this really annoys me.

Taller Hikari – windows 7 Build 7057 (RC1) en mi Acer Aspire One

I haven’t really looked into iscsi much as it looked slow, and some what useless unless you have lots of servers. While I was playing around with making my own iMac, Hamzah suggested I use gPXE to network boot my iMac. Today I started to play with gPXE and chainloading it on top of PXE worked really well. While digging around in documentation Hamzah, and I took interest in booting Windows using gPXE and iscsi or ATA over ethernet. We both decided to go ahead with iscsi, and by following http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot/win7.

A few things caught me out, which slowed me down. The first one was iscsi, make sure this is setup correctly. You don’t get any warnings that iscsi is working or not using gPXE and Windows. Make sure you actually point it to a block device and not to a file like I tried to do :P. Simplest method is to create a LVM volume. My ietd.conf looked like this.

Target iqn.2009-02.net.internaluse.salad:iscsiboot
         Lun 0 Path=/dev/data/iscsi,Type=fileio

The other problem I ran into was chainloading gPXE on PXE, once gPXE loads from PXE your BIOS or gPXE will no longer look for a DVD or CD drive making it impossible to install Windows 7. Find an old network card and flash the ROM in that. After that it was fairly easy to install, everything just worked.

I was quite amazed at the speed of the Windows 7 considering it was running of 100mbit iscsi.

TheSkorm – IMG_3438

Had some old hardware laying around at home, so I thought I would make my own iMac, or more namely, iBigMac. Started with a Dell 15″ LCD, an a7v8x-x with a AMD 450mhz CPU, and a nVidia Geforce graphics card and an unknown amount of RAM. It wasn’t much of a build. Make some holes in the LCD plastic, screw everything down and the hardware part was done.

I planned on using a USB stick to boot it, but he motherboard doesn’t support it so it’s network booting using PXE to my server, which is pretty cool. It’s BIOS is really quick, and since everything is loaded in RAM it’s quite speedy. It’s perfect for quickly looking at a website, and requires a lot less power. 100% recycled parts.

Oh, the red tape is to hold the motherboard on the screen at the top half. None of the holes lined up.

TheSkorm – TheSkorm.net

A few weeks back I moved from lighttpd 1.4 to the SVN version so I could blog from flickr. From what I have seen lighttpd 1.5 is looks quite nice.

I did have one problem though. I couldn’t seem to work out why fastcgi wasn’t compiling. Turns out that fastcgi has been completely removed from lighttpd and being replaced with mod_proxy_core.

Once I found this out, setting up fastcgi to work with lighttpd was a breeze. I installed spawn-fcgi on gentoo, and configured respectively. I then added a few lines into my config that looked something like this. It may vary depending on your fastcgi spawner config.

  $PHYSICAL["existing-path"] =~ ".php$" {
      proxy-core.balancer = "round-robin"
      proxy-core.protocol = "fastcgi"
      proxy-core.allow-x-sendfile = "enable"
      proxy-core.backends = ( "127.0.0.1:1026" )
      proxy-core.max-pool-size = 16
      proxy-core.rewrite-request = (
        "_pathinfo" => ( ".php(/.*)" => "$1" )
            )
     }

Rebooted lighttpd and everything was working wonderful.
A few sites that helped me out.
http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/wiki/Docs:ModProxyCore
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/freebsd-linux-lighttpd-1-5-fastcgi-configuration.html

TheSkorm – Top

Trying to find out which program on your server keeps on memory leaking is hard sometimes. If it uses up all of your memory, including swap then executing commands is extremely difficult. What I’ve always wanted for emergency sake, is a terminal that sits on my server running top and nothing else. Since my server had a memory problem last night I decided I would have a go at setting it up. I wasn’t all too hard.

In Gentoo, I found the file “/etc/inittab” which takes care of spawning all the login shells on the system. All that I had to do was change one of the lines to look like this. (Note that this is for Gentoo and may not work for any other system).

c6:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -n -l /usr/bin/top 38400 tty6 linux

Basically, -n is for no login and -l is to make agetty use /usr/bin/top instead of /bin/login for the program. A quick reboot and on Terminal 6 I had top running.

I don’t know how well top will run if there is no memory left, but it might come in handy in the future.