Geek Stuff category archive

So, at 9:30 this morning, Second Son’s on his way to Radio Slum to get a new router.

Three hours later and one call to Linksys (the router configuration wouldn’t open in my browser, and the support tech had to try a few tricks before we could get in there and open up Port 80 to get the website back on line), we’re back.

I mentioned here that all I had left to do is to get Podracer running as a cron job.

I’ve never had any luck setting up cron jobs, so I decided to RTFM.

I opened a terminal and entered the command man crontab (that tranlates into manual for crontab) and brought up the manual.

After reading the manual, I entered the command crontab -e to open my own personal cron file under my user name.

I entered this line in the vi editor (vi is not for the faint of heart; it’s taken me almost a year to feel at home in it).

0 19 * * * podracer

That means at 0 minutes and 19 hours of every day run podracer. The reason I selected 19 hours was to test whether I got it right.

I did. It’s a little after 7 p. m. and Podracer is happily automatically downloading podcasts even as I type.

When it’s done, I’ll edit crontab so that Podracer runs at 4 a. m. and every day’s downloading will be automated.

As it stands now, here are the contents of my signature file, which tells Podracer what to download (the lines preceded by the number sign are ignored by the program–they are to help me remember what the heck I’ve been doing):

#
#News
#
#Radio Times
http://www.npr.org/templates/rss/podcast.php?id=510027
#Diane Rehm Show
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510071
#Talk of the Nation
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=5
#Voices in the Family
http://www.whyy.org/rss/voices.xml
#Whaddya Know
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wyk/.jukebox?action=viewPodcast&podcastId=5243
#
#Linux
#
# Geek News Central
http://www.geeknewscentral.com/podcast.xml
#LQ Podcasts
http://feeds.feedburner.com/linuxquestions/LQPodcast
#LQRadio
http://feeds.feedburner.com/linuxquestions/LQRadioShowOnly
#Linux News
http://linux.quicksurf.com/?feed=rss2&cat=78

I highly recommend Geek News Central for anyone interested in the digital world. Todd Cochrane has a great newscast about geek stuff in plain English.

And he even read my email on the air and linked to Podracer.

Many times, when I’m at the cooling tower place, I don’t spend all my time on the floor. Sometimes, I just sit in an office and write.

Friday, I dropped into the local Milford Radio Slum looking for a portable radio so I could listen to WSDL when I’m doing the writing thing.

Now, I already have a couple of portable radios. One I keep in the church office so I can listen to WHYY while I’m doing the Treasurer thing. One is in no shape to travel because the antenna no longer telescopes and it cannot be safely put in my travel bag.

And I came out of Radio Slum with an MP3 player which also contains an FM radio. It was on clearance and cost only $40.00.

The radio was not strong enough to pull the station that I wanted. (No surprise in a big steel building 70 miles from the station.)

So I decided to enter the wonderful world of podcasts.

The MP3 player has a USB connection.

I connected it to the box and, after a bit of mucking about, I realized that Slackware was seeing the MP3 Player as a SCSI drive and calling it “sdc1” (Linux seems to see everying except an IDE device as a SCSI device).

I got it to mount by entering the following line in my FSTAB.

/dev/sdc1 /media/player auto auto,user 0 0

(Instead of mounting to /mnt, like most other drives, including the CDROM and the DVD writer, it mounts to /media, because it is a media player).

I was then able to manipulate the player like any other drive.

I started nosing around for an aggregator that I could use to automate the downloading of podcasts, and I found Podracer. It works like a charm.

One hint, though: Podracer, like most other *nix programs, must be installed by root (for those poor folks who still use Windows, root is sort of like the Windows “Administrator,” only secure). Howsomever, when it’s run for the first time, it should be run by the user name of that you wish to use to run the program. If you run it the first time as “root,” it will not work for other users. The programmer advertises it as a very simple program, and that, my friends, is truth in packaging.

Right now, Podracer is running and happily downloading podcasts that I will listen to later.

You list the rss links to the podcasts you wish to download in a simple text file in this format (the number sign means that line is “remarked out,” that is, ignored:

# ChuckChat Freestyle
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChuckChat

The next step is to identify podcasts I want and to set up podracer as a cron job.

(I’ll leave out the part about calling Opie and having him point out the obvious to me, but my geek license is officially rescinded.)

Vista flops:

(Windows–ed.) XP was supposed to be off the vendor’s (Micro$oft–ed.) price list by the end of January 2008. Now it will stick around until the end of the second quarter. The cut down Starter edition for very low end machines will stay on Microsoft’s price list till 2010.

Mike Nash, Microsoft corporate vice president, Windows product management, put a brave face on the decision, claiming that, “While we’ve been pleased with the positive response we’ve seen and heard from customers using Windows Vista, there are some customers who need a little more time to make the switch to Windows Vista.”

Or put another way, punters are doing anything they can to avoid having to install and run Vista on their machines.

Helpful hints from Kroll.

The annivesary of the (hoick! ptui!) emoticon.

A crutch for those who are unable to express themselves with words (LOL):

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.

🙂

Twenty-five years ago, three keystrokes – a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis – were first used as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman, the university said.

The plug for the hub came out of the UPS.

Thus illustrating a primary principle of organizational dynamics (and, for that matter, politics):

Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.

I upgraded the laptop last week.

Rather than do an upgrade installation, which can be a tedious process, I backed up all my data files to the file server, including crucial configuration files such as the Samba and the rc.firewall configuration files. rc.firewall is the current iteration of the old Projectfiles firewall.

I then fdisked the puppy down to bare electrons and loaded Slackware 12.0 from scratch, with the default 2.6.51 kernel. In the process, I got rid of a lot of stuff I’ve played with and abandoned over the last couple of years, but which was still hanging around and taking up space.

It was worth the effort. The machine boots faster, multi-tasks faster, and swaps less. Memory intensive tasks, such as doing parity checks on downloaded files and “unraring” large downloads, used to noticeably and annoyingly slow down multitasking.

Now, such tasks sometimes noticeably slow down the multitasking, but they don’t annoyingly slow it down.

After getting the basics working, I installed Dropline Gnome, not because I like Gnome (I don’t like how it looks or feels), but because a lot of the software I do like to use needs Gnome libraries (for you Windows types, libraries are sort of like *.dlls).

I did find a couple of oddities.

I had to run alsaconf to get the sound card working. In previous installations on several computers, I’ve not had to do this.

par2cmdline doesn’t seem to like Slackware 12.0, but gpar2 works just fine to perform the same function.

Google Earth crashes X Server. I don’t use Google Earth much and have plently of other computers to run it on until I finish trouble-shooting it.

In fact, I’m so happy with Slackware 12.0 that I installed it on my file server (that 10-year old Pentium IBM PC 300 that used to run the website) today. From fdisk to back on the network with anti-virus and firewall and receiving a backup from my work computer–three hours, counting smoke breaks. (No, I haven’t installed Dropline Gnome on it and probably won’t–it’s a server. It’s just supposed to sit there and quietly serve).

Is sweet.

I upgraded the laptop (which the computer I use for ‘most everything).

Still a little tweaking to do with the Fluxbox interface, but everything else is back where it should be.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

I discovered a little problem with the sound card. but LQ fixed it right up.

Windows:

Scott McCausland (AKA sk0t), the ex-admin of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker, was sentenced to five months imprisonment after he confessed to uploading copies of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith just before its theatrical release. He was also sentenced to a further five months of home confinement and slapped with a monitoring order after he was convicted of “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” and “criminal copyright infringement”.

(snip)

Using monitoring software and wearing a monitoring bracelet were bitter enough pill but switching to Windows is just too much for the Tux-lover, who intends to fight the decision.

So, the sidebar broke this afternoon with some wierd memory error pointing to
/opt/lampp/htdocs/weblog/wp-includes/wp-db.php
when Wilmington Weather tried to load.

After much searching, I found out that the culprit was not
/opt/lampp/htdocs/weblog/wp-includes/wp-db.php.

It was /opt/lampp/share/php.ini. It was limiting the memory to 8 MB (the default setting). I had changed the setting on the old server. Now I’ve changed the setting on the new server to 20 megabites.

Opie told me about this months ago. That’s why I changed the setting on the old server. I should have thought to change it on the new server.

But everything seems to be working now.

Windows, no doubt. Or possibly Ubuntu.

A German chap who demonstrated his frustration with his PC by throwing it out of the window escaped a fine when police oficers decided they rather sympathised with his actions.

(snip)

The unnamed 51-year-old perp explained he’d “got annoyed” with his machine, which struck a chord with the police officer who admitted: “Who hasn’t felt like doing that?”

Accordingly, he was not sanctioned for disturbing the peace, but was made to clear up the mess. The make of computer and offending OS are not noted.

On the work computer, I have Norton Anti-Virus.

The reason I have Norton on it is that it’s not my computer; it’s the company’s. (Were it mine, I’d have F-Prot.)

Norton just interrupted me to ask whether I wanted to run Live Update. So I agreed.

At the end, displayed a message to save all my work and restart the computer.

Now, here’s the obnoxious thing: It then proceeded to shut down all the programs itself.

Immediately. I didn’t get time for a mouse-click.

(Yeah, I did get the option to save my work, but really, now.)

Gosh, I’m really glad I don’t use Windows unless I have to.

To my new server. It’s working.

I couldn’t face another cooling tower today, so I spent the day messing with MySQL and WordPress.

I think everything came over okay, but please let me know if anything doesn’t work right.

Adendum: Later that same day:

I think my two or three regular readers will notice a significant performance improvement.

I’ll work on getting all the newsfeeds and stuff working later. Right now, I’m in I-Hate-Computers mode. I even called Opie for tech support and, between us, we managed to get everything working. (Thanks, Opie.) But, like in real life, neither one of us could figure out exactly what was broke or exactly what fixed it. We were yakking on the phone and hitting keys and it started to work.

In the meantime, here is some information about the new box: It runs

XAMPP for Linux 1.6.2, which includes

MySQL 5.0.41, PHP 5.2.2, Apache 2.2.4, and PERL 5.8.7 .

The operating system is Slackware Linux 10.1

The computer is a Pentium III 1000 gHz computer with 528 MB RAM, two IDE harddrives and one SCSI harddrive, a SCSI tape drive, a CD-ROM drive, and an external USB DVD-RW drive.

(aside to Opie) It was a surplussed Checkpoint Win2000 server.

And now back to the regularly scheduled flame wars.

I have a little network.

Now, here’s what’s wierd:

Orca is the new XP box. It’s my own copy of XP; I wiped it and started fresh.

The printer and a couple of directories are shared. Guest logins are allowed. Local login names and passwords on all the computers are the same (I am a bear of very small memory).

Orca can see and browse all the other shares on all the computers on the network, both the Windows computers and the Samba shares on the Linux computers.

The Linux computers can see and browse folders on Orca via Samba. The Linux computers have full Linux networking capability with each other, because Linux networking works, like, you know, out of the box. Well, out of the box as soon as you get LISa working.

But the other bleeding Windows computers! When they try to connect to Orca, they get a “You are not authorized to use this network resource” message.

I know that Orca’s firewall (NetDefense from System Suite v. 5) is set up properly, since the Linux boxes can see the share folders.

Conclusion: Windows workgroup networking sucks.

If anyone has any idea what’s going on, I’d like to hear it.

With apologies to Opie (see his comment here), XAMPP is installed and working. The non-database elements of the website (that is, everything except the blog) have been copied over to the new server and are working almost fine (almost, because the javascript “updated” statement at the bottom of the boating webpages seems to be choking).

I also got the printer successfully networked to the new server.

There are certain security issues with XAMPP I want to resolve. I don’t make anything public with no passwords, thank you very much.

But, over the next few days weeks months, I’ll be working on moving the database and perfecting the theme.

I just knew there was a way to completely automate this process. Now I’ve learned about BASH variables.

#!/bin/bash

# This script stops Apache,
# gzips the current log files,
# removes the old log files (access_log and error_log),
# creates a new folder named with today’s date and time,
# moves the gzipped log files to that location, then
# restarts Apache.
#
# The name of the folder is “month-day-year-hour-minute” so
# that the script can be run multiple times in the same day
# without stepping on itself (unless you run it twice in
# the same second).
#
# If someone wishes to tailor the script to his or her own
# system, it should work fine as long as the path
# statements are edited to reflect his or her configuration.

NOW=$1

: ${NOW:=$(date +”%m-%d-%Y-%H-%m”)}

cd /usr/local/apache2/bin
./apachectl stop

echo “Stopping Apache”

cd /usr/local/apache2/logs
mv access_log access_log.old
mv error_log error_log.old

echo “Renaming log files”

gzip access_log.old
gzip error_log.old

echo “Zipping log files”

#Gzip removes the original files after zipping them.

echo “Removing *.old files.”

mkdir /root/files/oldlogs/$NOW

echo “Making folder /root/files/oldlogs/$NOW”

mv /usr/local/apache2/logs/*.gz /root/files/oldlogs/$NOW

echo “Archiving old log files.”

cd /usr/local/apache2/bin
./apachectl restart

echo “Restarting Apache”

I’ve loaded the Operating System, got the Firewall and Antivirus working, and installed Opera.

Next step: Get Lisa and Samba working.

Oh, yeah, and tomorrow I’m pouring concrete.

Which should resolve some of the speed problems.

I picked up a Dell Dimension 4700 at the local computer secondhand store (which, by the way, has the only repair bench which I will allow to touch any of my boxes). I also got a nice KVM switch from Radio Slum, so that I didn’t need an additional keyboard, mouse, or monitor.

At first, I was unable to get Slackware Linux 11.0 to see the hard drive on the new Dell, till, thanks to Linux Questions dot org, I realized that I was starting cfdisk with the wrong switch.

The computer has and SATA harddrive. Linux sees that as a SCSI (pronounced “scuzzy”) drive.

So, to create the partitions, I had to start cfdisk like this:

cfdisk /dev/sda, (translation: cfdisk /device/scsi drive a)

rather than like this:

cfdisk /dev/hda (translation: cfdisk /device/harddrive a). The later works for IDE drives, which is what most older computers have, but not for SATA drives.

Since, of course, no good deed goes unpunished, there is another wrinkle–Linux is not seeing the network card in the computer. The next step will be to dig up an old network card, slap it in there, and see if Linux sees that (Rule One of Troubleshooting–Rule out hardware problems first).

Since I’ve loaded Slack on at least five or six boxes so far and never run into this before, I’m inclined to think it is a hardware problem, since, with Linux, networking is not an afterthought–it was built in from the beginning.

Once I get this puppy on line, it won’t be long till I retire my PC300 to being just a file server.

And maybe I can get my sidebar back.

My sidebar’s gone freaky on me. I won’t be able to troubleshoot it until this weekend, so I’ve edited it down as much as I can tonight.

But I can’t remember where Quote of the Day resides (blush).

I’ll have it fixed up by Monday.

Addendum, 5/4/2007:

I think the problem was Fire Stats that I was crowing about in the previous post. This site was slow as the Current Federal Administration’s grasp of reality this morning even after a reboot last night.

Fire Stats was just too much of an additional load for this 10-year old computer.

Teach me to crow.

For a short while there this morning, I had the old sidebar back, then it crashed again.

I have removed all traces of Fire Stats and started to shop for a new server. I think it’s just gotten too much for this old computer.