I've been working on a system at The Working Centre called pitviper to replace the compaq deskpro I was using as the basement inventory server. Though the deskpro was more powerful, PII 450MHz versus the 200MHz pitviper uses, pitviper has 5 hard drives and a CD-ROM. Setup is as follows:
SCSI ID #0: IBM DCAS-34330
SCSI ID #2: (removed a 2.1GB Quantum for a 9.1GB SCSI IBM drive)
SCSI ID #3: IBM DCAS-34330
SCSI ID #4: TOSHIBA CDROM XM-37017A
SCSI ID #5: IBM DCAS-34330
SCSI ID #7: AHA-2940 Ultra/Ultra W
I low level formatted each of the SCSI drives.
I've installed Ubuntu on the first drive. Ubuntu takes a lot of control away from administrators, it probably wasn't the best choice to begin with. Unfortunately I'll be too busy at work the next couple of days to change the OS. Bill, from TWC, mentioned he wanted a RAID 5 array - I'm not sure why, but since I've never played with SCSI at all before (outside of proprietary SCSI scanner) it's a nice challenge, and working out well.
At home I have a couple of boxes with SCSI cards, my Red Hat 7.2 game server, and my main SuSE desktop box, which is out of commission because I was tinkering at 3am last night. The game machine is interesting because all the SCSI devices are external, a CD-ROM and tape backup. The game machine is, unfortunately, a Compaq-branded machine that has no option to boot to SCSI devices. It's an extremely slim machine, perfect for the application, but I can't boot to CD to install something more recent. A project for another day, but contending distributions are Gentoo, Slackware, and Debian.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Adding new software to SuSE 9.2
SuSE Linux version 9.2 is one of the most Windows-like distributions around. Most of the system administration is done from a central administration tool, YaST. But there's one area of SuSE that's a bit tricky for new Linux users, adding new software.
Adding new software is simple if you're just adding software that comes with the 9.2-Personal ISO CD, or if you're one of the lucky folks who own the Professional DVD (I own the professional version and the docs alone make it worth the $130CDN). Even if you own the Personal ISO, you can still get a lot more software, in fact, almost everything on the Professional CD, simply by telling YaST where it needs to look.
After you've done a fresh install SuSE looks to the Personal ISO CD or DVD for software. This is good, but it limits you to software on CD or DVD. For the most software you need to point YaST to one of the SuSE mirrors. Do this by launching YaST and selecting Change Source of Installation.
When the Software Source Media screen appears, click Add and http source then fill in the info shown in the image below.
This will set you up for the SuSE mirror on Ale, a site in the United States. You can set yourself up for a closer mirror by googling for SuSE mirrors. I usually disable the CD/DVD as a source after choosing an Internet mirror because the CD/DVD generally contains older software. I also raise the Internet source before the CD/DVD using the arrows at the bottom of the Software Source Media screen.
Adding new software is simple if you're just adding software that comes with the 9.2-Personal ISO CD, or if you're one of the lucky folks who own the Professional DVD (I own the professional version and the docs alone make it worth the $130CDN). Even if you own the Personal ISO, you can still get a lot more software, in fact, almost everything on the Professional CD, simply by telling YaST where it needs to look.
After you've done a fresh install SuSE looks to the Personal ISO CD or DVD for software. This is good, but it limits you to software on CD or DVD. For the most software you need to point YaST to one of the SuSE mirrors. Do this by launching YaST and selecting Change Source of Installation.
When the Software Source Media screen appears, click Add and http source then fill in the info shown in the image below.
This will set you up for the SuSE mirror on Ale, a site in the United States. You can set yourself up for a closer mirror by googling for SuSE mirrors. I usually disable the CD/DVD as a source after choosing an Internet mirror because the CD/DVD generally contains older software. I also raise the Internet source before the CD/DVD using the arrows at the bottom of the Software Source Media screen.
Friday, March 18, 2005
Interesting hardware
Volunteering at The Working Centre I get to sometimes see some unusual hardware and be involved in some unusual projects. Not everyone has stores around that carry SCSI drives and controller cards. Sure there's always mail order, but mail order isn't always a comfortable choice. The other day I built a machine with 5 SCSI hard drives and a 20GB SCSI tape backup, not your typical home PC, but then again, most of the readers here probably are not typical PC owners. I'm always interested in hearing about what cool things people are doing with their PC's, particularly if it involves unusual hardware and Linux.
Lately I've had a bit of a hankering to get more exposure to new hardware. Volunteering is great, but my day job is non-technical, so when I'm talking about Linux it's always from a pure end-user perspective. I've been a computer consultant before, but almost all the solutions I created were based on Windows. (I've done DOS and OS/2 consulting). So, though I like what I do now, I have my eyes open for opportunities in the area to gain more exposure to new hardware and perhaps integrate a little of that new hardware experience into this web log.
For now I want to leave you with some interesting retro-ish photographs. The photograph below is of a 10GB, yes, that is gigabyte, hard drive. This beast looks like it should be a 10 MB, megabyte, hard drive, but it's a 10GB SCSI hard drive - honest!
And because I was really into SCSI the other day I decided to take a photograph of an Ultra Wide SCSI adapter. This Adaptec adapter is capable of handling up to 15 devices.
I should mention a word of thanks to my friend Kevin who gave me a different Ultra-Wide SCSI adapter for one of my home machines. I've had a 4GB Segate SCSI drive sitting unused for about 6 months now. Unfortunately the correct module did not load, so I'm going to recompile the kernel on that machine.
I've been toying with the idea of having some sort of identification contest, with prizes from Linux vendors. I have a few Ubuntu CD's I can give away. Right now it's just an idea.
Until tomorrow....
Charles
Lately I've had a bit of a hankering to get more exposure to new hardware. Volunteering is great, but my day job is non-technical, so when I'm talking about Linux it's always from a pure end-user perspective. I've been a computer consultant before, but almost all the solutions I created were based on Windows. (I've done DOS and OS/2 consulting). So, though I like what I do now, I have my eyes open for opportunities in the area to gain more exposure to new hardware and perhaps integrate a little of that new hardware experience into this web log.
For now I want to leave you with some interesting retro-ish photographs. The photograph below is of a 10GB, yes, that is gigabyte, hard drive. This beast looks like it should be a 10 MB, megabyte, hard drive, but it's a 10GB SCSI hard drive - honest!
And because I was really into SCSI the other day I decided to take a photograph of an Ultra Wide SCSI adapter. This Adaptec adapter is capable of handling up to 15 devices.
I should mention a word of thanks to my friend Kevin who gave me a different Ultra-Wide SCSI adapter for one of my home machines. I've had a 4GB Segate SCSI drive sitting unused for about 6 months now. Unfortunately the correct module did not load, so I'm going to recompile the kernel on that machine.
I've been toying with the idea of having some sort of identification contest, with prizes from Linux vendors. I have a few Ubuntu CD's I can give away. Right now it's just an idea.
Until tomorrow....
Charles
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
VNC & SSH to the rescue
I have more computers than I have monitors. At the moment the only monitor I have available to me is a Hyundai 14” monitor that doesn't seem to want to do any graphics other than EGA quality. Normally, this would be a big problem, how to do any work with a useless monitor?
Well the monitor was good enough that I could do a SuSE install, pressing F2 at the install prompt and selecting text-mode instead of VESA. Once SuSE was installed I unplugged the monitor, unplugged the keyboard, and the mouse. Why? VNC, Virtual Network Computing. VNC lets me control one desktop from another. I don't necessarily have to be running a graphical desktop on the destination computer, in fact I have duriel set to a text-prompt login. VNC lets me log in to KDM/KDE, bypassing the problem of having a decent monitor.
What good is remote administration? Remote administration lets me make changes to duriel, work on projects that I can synchronize with mephisto, my notebook, and back up to diablo, my pvpgn server, which also happens to have a SCSI tape drive attached to it. On duriel I have a CD+/-RW and 80GB of hard drive, the most space of any of my machines. Being able to store data on duriel and then back it up to CD is critical.
If I really wanted a bit of fun I could run a network game on both computers and play both players from my notebook.
As great as VNC is I wasn't able to drag and drop from my current desktop to my other, probably a security feature, I'll have to examine this further. So, to make up for not being able to copy things via VNC, I enabled the SSH server on the remote machine. SSH also came in handy disabling the graphical login. I used SSH to log in to duriel, then I ran the non-graphical yast (graphical yast is called yast2) and switched the login from graphical to text - note that this does NOT change the graphical VNC login, which is cool.
Well the monitor was good enough that I could do a SuSE install, pressing F2 at the install prompt and selecting text-mode instead of VESA. Once SuSE was installed I unplugged the monitor, unplugged the keyboard, and the mouse. Why? VNC, Virtual Network Computing. VNC lets me control one desktop from another. I don't necessarily have to be running a graphical desktop on the destination computer, in fact I have duriel set to a text-prompt login. VNC lets me log in to KDM/KDE, bypassing the problem of having a decent monitor.
What good is remote administration? Remote administration lets me make changes to duriel, work on projects that I can synchronize with mephisto, my notebook, and back up to diablo, my pvpgn server, which also happens to have a SCSI tape drive attached to it. On duriel I have a CD+/-RW and 80GB of hard drive, the most space of any of my machines. Being able to store data on duriel and then back it up to CD is critical.
If I really wanted a bit of fun I could run a network game on both computers and play both players from my notebook.
As great as VNC is I wasn't able to drag and drop from my current desktop to my other, probably a security feature, I'll have to examine this further. So, to make up for not being able to copy things via VNC, I enabled the SSH server on the remote machine. SSH also came in handy disabling the graphical login. I used SSH to log in to duriel, then I ran the non-graphical yast (graphical yast is called yast2) and switched the login from graphical to text - note that this does NOT change the graphical VNC login, which is cool.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Why I'll never go back to Windows
With the impending Windows presentation next month I thought it would be a good time to discuss why I'd never go back to Windows on my own personal hardware, other than for work-related issues where I absolutely *must* use Windows.
It can all be summed up in the screen shot below:
It can all be summed up in the screen shot below:
Monday, March 07, 2005
Transgaming completely useless!
In the spirit of my daily rant I have to point out that I tried installing Diablo 2 LOD under Transgaming's Cedega 4.2.1 and it doesn't work. All I get is a screen saying I have to install Diablo 2, which I've already done. Diablo 2 worked only after some tweaking which could have been done with the free version of WINE. Not sure what I'm paying Transgaming for, they've been pretty useless so far.
Heroes of Might and Magic IV, which the Transgaming site also says works, fails to even run the installer. Another top game I play which is useless.
Civilization, another game Cedega is suppose to run really well, also does not install properly. The installation gets to 100% and keeps displaying screens. It refuses to exit.
Heroes of Might and Magic IV, which the Transgaming site also says works, fails to even run the installer. Another top game I play which is useless.
Civilization, another game Cedega is suppose to run really well, also does not install properly. The installation gets to 100% and keeps displaying screens. It refuses to exit.
Ubuntu Live CD...fails to live up to the hype.
There has been a lot of hype surrounding the Ubuntu Linux distribution recently. I decided to give the Live CD a run on my fiance's system. I was bitterly disappointed. The Live CD doesn't come near to living up to the hype it's given. What follows are a few problems I ran into:
1. The Live CD doesn't have ADSL support (at least doesn't have a gui for it). To me this means the live cd is crippled because Internet access is a major feature of Linux. I realize there's only so much to put on a live CD, but why put any Internet software on the CD if end users can't even connect to the Internet.
2. The Live CD crashed the first 2 times I tried booting it.
3. Many programs on the CD would not load even with 384MB RAM.
4. The XServer seems to run too high for the LCD. As the XServer loads a lot of horizontal stripes race across the screen. It's not so bad when the server has finished loading.
I didn't even test the printing facilities or check out the other hardware support, it's possible that sound and the USB cam wouldn't be supported. After having tried the SuSE Live CD I have to say Ubuntu lags behind SuSE by a wide margin.
1. The Live CD doesn't have ADSL support (at least doesn't have a gui for it). To me this means the live cd is crippled because Internet access is a major feature of Linux. I realize there's only so much to put on a live CD, but why put any Internet software on the CD if end users can't even connect to the Internet.
2. The Live CD crashed the first 2 times I tried booting it.
3. Many programs on the CD would not load even with 384MB RAM.
4. The XServer seems to run too high for the LCD. As the XServer loads a lot of horizontal stripes race across the screen. It's not so bad when the server has finished loading.
I didn't even test the printing facilities or check out the other hardware support, it's possible that sound and the USB cam wouldn't be supported. After having tried the SuSE Live CD I have to say Ubuntu lags behind SuSE by a wide margin.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Another cool project - pvpgn
I've abandoned the idea of putting anything in that old SGI Indigo case, it really wasn't worth the effort for a cool case, but I started a new project which has been moderately successful so far.
As everyone who has read my web log for more than a few days knows, one of my favorite games is Diablo II LOD. I do have Transgaming's Cedega, so I can play the game under Linux, but I wanted to do something a bit more, playing alone can be boring after you've run the Cow level for the zillionth time.
So I decided to set up my own Battle Net closed server. One of the important decisions was to keep the server portable, so it could be taken places without requiring a lot of heavy lifting. A laptop would have been ideal for the project, but they're still too expensive just for running a battlenet server, so I opted for a slim Compaq Desqpro, a 450MHz with 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. The Working Centre has a couple of these machines for about $65, but be warned, they don't come with CD-ROMs and finding a CD-ROM that fits would probably cost as much as the machine.
I did a network install of Debian Sarge with a minimum of packages. After the base packages had finished I added apache, mysql, less, and ftp so I could use some of the more advanced features of PVPGN, the player versus player Battle Net software. PVPGN use to be called bnetd until Blizzard threatened to sue the developers. I could be wrong, but I think Blizzard pressed the suit against the open source developers, but the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, has stepped in to help financially and legally – thank god, the servers certainly don't hurt Blizzard and it's rather greedy of the company to try and shut the project down.
Anyway, I have my server all configured. I can log on to the IRC, Internet Relay Chat, portion of the server with my xchat Linux client, but I can't seem to connect using Diablo II LOD v1.10. I checked my bnetd logs and they seem to be showing that I'm trying to log in as localhost 127.0.0.1, but I'm actually trying using a different machine. I'm wondering if my wireless router both are connected to is passing the right I.P.
I'm going to add a SCSI card I bought a few weeks ago at the UW surplus sale for $1.00. I have an external SCSI CD-ROM and a tape backup. I may have the machine double as a backup server.
I've never been one to back stuff up because a lot of things I do are experimental. That said, I had my machine perfect a couple of weeks ago, then I ran into a problem not being able to log in to a KDE session with my usual account. I had to wipe the account and create a new one. I erased a lot of settings that I wish I had back, so I may set up the pvpgn machine, aka duriel, as a backup server too.
Tonight I'm going to try pvpgn's irc channel to see if I can't get the problem solved.
As everyone who has read my web log for more than a few days knows, one of my favorite games is Diablo II LOD. I do have Transgaming's Cedega, so I can play the game under Linux, but I wanted to do something a bit more, playing alone can be boring after you've run the Cow level for the zillionth time.
So I decided to set up my own Battle Net closed server. One of the important decisions was to keep the server portable, so it could be taken places without requiring a lot of heavy lifting. A laptop would have been ideal for the project, but they're still too expensive just for running a battlenet server, so I opted for a slim Compaq Desqpro, a 450MHz with 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. The Working Centre has a couple of these machines for about $65, but be warned, they don't come with CD-ROMs and finding a CD-ROM that fits would probably cost as much as the machine.
I did a network install of Debian Sarge with a minimum of packages. After the base packages had finished I added apache, mysql, less, and ftp so I could use some of the more advanced features of PVPGN, the player versus player Battle Net software. PVPGN use to be called bnetd until Blizzard threatened to sue the developers. I could be wrong, but I think Blizzard pressed the suit against the open source developers, but the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, has stepped in to help financially and legally – thank god, the servers certainly don't hurt Blizzard and it's rather greedy of the company to try and shut the project down.
Anyway, I have my server all configured. I can log on to the IRC, Internet Relay Chat, portion of the server with my xchat Linux client, but I can't seem to connect using Diablo II LOD v1.10. I checked my bnetd logs and they seem to be showing that I'm trying to log in as localhost 127.0.0.1, but I'm actually trying using a different machine. I'm wondering if my wireless router both are connected to is passing the right I.P.
I'm going to add a SCSI card I bought a few weeks ago at the UW surplus sale for $1.00. I have an external SCSI CD-ROM and a tape backup. I may have the machine double as a backup server.
I've never been one to back stuff up because a lot of things I do are experimental. That said, I had my machine perfect a couple of weeks ago, then I ran into a problem not being able to log in to a KDE session with my usual account. I had to wipe the account and create a new one. I erased a lot of settings that I wish I had back, so I may set up the pvpgn machine, aka duriel, as a backup server too.
Tonight I'm going to try pvpgn's irc channel to see if I can't get the problem solved.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
New used hardware
I picked up some used hardware the other day. Two Asus Pentium II motherboards with 233MHz and 266MHz processors for $0.99 and $1.99 respectively. I'm not sure what I'll do with the boards yet, but I've been toying with a few ideas for file/print/dialup servers and I'll probably create another mp3 box.
What I'm discovering is that it's tough to find cheap desktop cases, everyone has tower ATX cases which don't look anything like a stereo component. The case is the main obstacle to getting these machines running. I already have a couple of processor-less boards sitting in my closet, though one is both slot and socket.
The past couple of weeks I've also been thinking about wiring up the house with Cat 5 cable and creating a dial-on-demand dialup server so that Roy could access the Internet and I could keep my modem. I'd go broadband, but I don't plan on staying here much longer.
I also picked up a couple of 10/100 NICs for $0.99 each, a real find since I'm down to a 10MB/s card with both RJ45 and BNC connectors. Some guys were dumpster diving and I sallied nearby and saw them toss a couple of external SCSI cables to the front so I reached in and grabbed them. There was an old Alpha in the dumpster with the top removed. It looked too awkward, and because I wasn't there for Alphas (I was looking for a Sun box) I decided to leave it, but I did pull a RAM chip from a nearby board...I still haven't checked to see what the chip is.
Last night I spent some time at Kevin's house trying to figure out why his palm III wouldn't sync under SuSE 9.2. Everything looked in order package-wise, though he had a little bit of misconfiguration in KPilot, I would imagine it happened after things didn't work. As it turns out, the real problem was that permissions were not properly set for /dev/ttyS0. The sojurn reminded me that I really should get my m125 syncing under Linux again. I haven't used my palm much because it eats 2 AAA batteries every day! If you're thinking of buying a used m125 - beware! I'm also not a big fan of the screen - the screen is too dark for my taste. But I love handheld technology, and having sunk another $125 into a logitech keyboard for my m125 I'm not so quick to give it up. The Avantgo software/service is my favourite thing about the Palm, but I've never set it up under Linux, though there appears to be a connector for KDE.
Daniel Allen, a co-developer on The Working Centre Linux Project, got an article published in Linux Journal this month - congratulations Daniel!
I've been mulling through Marcel Gagne's Moving to Linux the Business Desktop. Chapter 9 was a bit difficult to follow, but most of the chapters have been the same old stuff I already know with one pleasent exception:
rpm --rebuild
I didn't know you could rebuild new rpms on older systems. According to the book I can take a rpm designed for Fedora Core and rebuild it for Red Hat 7.2. -- news to me. I'm a little disappointed there haven't been a lot of "business ideas" in the book. I think I'd like something that adds a few case studies beside examples. I wonder if the reverse would be true of rebuild? Could I take a Red Hat 7.2 binary and rebuild it for Fedora Core? How about another architecture?
Tomorrow I'll be dropping by The Working Centre to add a couple of accounts to the samba file server. Apparently a couple of the guys want areas to privately store stuff...hmmn, sounds like porn., maybe I'll also add a script that reports if a particular user is using a lot of space...
What I'm discovering is that it's tough to find cheap desktop cases, everyone has tower ATX cases which don't look anything like a stereo component. The case is the main obstacle to getting these machines running. I already have a couple of processor-less boards sitting in my closet, though one is both slot and socket.
The past couple of weeks I've also been thinking about wiring up the house with Cat 5 cable and creating a dial-on-demand dialup server so that Roy could access the Internet and I could keep my modem. I'd go broadband, but I don't plan on staying here much longer.
I also picked up a couple of 10/100 NICs for $0.99 each, a real find since I'm down to a 10MB/s card with both RJ45 and BNC connectors. Some guys were dumpster diving and I sallied nearby and saw them toss a couple of external SCSI cables to the front so I reached in and grabbed them. There was an old Alpha in the dumpster with the top removed. It looked too awkward, and because I wasn't there for Alphas (I was looking for a Sun box) I decided to leave it, but I did pull a RAM chip from a nearby board...I still haven't checked to see what the chip is.
Last night I spent some time at Kevin's house trying to figure out why his palm III wouldn't sync under SuSE 9.2. Everything looked in order package-wise, though he had a little bit of misconfiguration in KPilot, I would imagine it happened after things didn't work. As it turns out, the real problem was that permissions were not properly set for /dev/ttyS0. The sojurn reminded me that I really should get my m125 syncing under Linux again. I haven't used my palm much because it eats 2 AAA batteries every day! If you're thinking of buying a used m125 - beware! I'm also not a big fan of the screen - the screen is too dark for my taste. But I love handheld technology, and having sunk another $125 into a logitech keyboard for my m125 I'm not so quick to give it up. The Avantgo software/service is my favourite thing about the Palm, but I've never set it up under Linux, though there appears to be a connector for KDE.
Daniel Allen, a co-developer on The Working Centre Linux Project, got an article published in Linux Journal this month - congratulations Daniel!
I've been mulling through Marcel Gagne's Moving to Linux the Business Desktop. Chapter 9 was a bit difficult to follow, but most of the chapters have been the same old stuff I already know with one pleasent exception:
rpm --rebuild
I didn't know you could rebuild new rpms on older systems. According to the book I can take a rpm designed for Fedora Core and rebuild it for Red Hat 7.2. -- news to me. I'm a little disappointed there haven't been a lot of "business ideas" in the book. I think I'd like something that adds a few case studies beside examples. I wonder if the reverse would be true of rebuild? Could I take a Red Hat 7.2 binary and rebuild it for Fedora Core? How about another architecture?
Tomorrow I'll be dropping by The Working Centre to add a couple of accounts to the samba file server. Apparently a couple of the guys want areas to privately store stuff...hmmn, sounds like porn., maybe I'll also add a script that reports if a particular user is using a lot of space...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)