Category Archives: Technology

Bacula

Software, ,

Lately we’ve been looking at backup solutions at work.

And I’ve got to say that Bacula is looking downright awesome. It’s GPL’d and it has just about every feature a person could ask for.

I am a complete Bacula newbie. Today, after using Bacula for a total of about 30-60 minutes, I added the first client machine to my Linux test box. The client machine was running the Windows bacula client. It took about 10 minutes to install and configure the client and the server. And both backup and restore worked perfectly the first time. Nice. Setting up a *nix client is even easier.

I’ve been using Amanda for many years at home and at various workplaces. Looks like we’re going to be switching.

We’ve also ordered an HP MSL4048, a 48-tape LTO3 library with barcode support. Each tape has a native storage capacity of 400GB. Should be nice when it arrives. With that library and Bacula, we should be able to back up all our servers using a single backup system. And both our Windows and Unix people can manage the system, including running restores to any machine, from any authorized console machine.

Debian From Scratch 0.99.0 Is Out

Debian

At long last, I’ve finally updated Debian From Scratch (DFS). For those of you not familiar with DFS, it’s a single, full rescue CD capable of working with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even compiling a new kernel. The DFS ISO images also contain a small Debian mirror subset that lets you use cdebootstrap, along with the other utilities on the CD, to perform a manual, “Gentoo-like” installation. It also serves as an excellent rescue CD, with a full compliment of filesystem tools, backup/restore software, and a development environment complete enough to build your own kernels.

DFS also refers to dfsbuild, the tool that generates DFS images. dfsbuild is available as a Debian package. dfsbuild is designed to make it trivial to build your own custom DFS images. You can have your own set of Debian packages on your images, your own kernels, etc. Unlike many other systems, you can go from the example dfs.cfg to a customized DFS build in just a few minutes, even if you’ve never used dfsbuild before.

Version 0.99.0 is a from-scratch rewrite and port to Haskell. You can read the full list of new features in the announcement, but the biggest is that it now supports standard Debian initramfs kernels in addition to ones that have enough drivers statically linked to be able to read the CD-ROM.

You can also download my DFS images or browse the docs online.

Dupes really fixed now

Software, , ,

Thanks to some assistance from Garvin (lead Serendipity developer), it looks like the bug that Planet dislikes so intensely is indeed the <slash:comments> tag. I don’t believe this is a bug in Serendipity bug rather in Planet.

(There is still, IMHO, a pubDate bug in Serendipity, but it appears to be unrelated)

So, the dupes you were seeing from me really are gone now. I hope.

The fix is to edit the file templates/default/feed_2.0.tpl and remove the line that provides the <slash:comments> tag.

BTW, seems that Planet Haskell also ran afoul of this.

Sorry for the dupes

Software, , ,

It seems that some of my posts are appearing on Planet Debian multiple times, and others not at all. I think the problem is a strange combination between subtle bugs in Planet and Serendipity. The SF bug report for Serendipity is here. I think the workaround should fix this.

Either that, or Planet is somehow taking offense as the <slash:comments> tag that Serendipity is putting in there.

Sorry about that — hopefully it is fixed now.

Mail Server Comparison

Humor, Software, , ,

After my mail reader comparison, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few mail server troubles. So here, to help you with your mail server decisions, is my mail server comparison.

  • Postfix: Your mail can now have the distinction of being deleted by 53 individual subservers
  • Sendmail: Priority treatment if you can write, while holding down your Shift key, an m4 macro to calculate the airspeed velicoty of an unladen swallow. All other messages will be summarily deleted in 6-8 weeks, or whenever the queue daemon catches up, whichever is later
  • Exim: Conveniently marks every message as “unrouteable” to reduce the hassle of making up reasons to bounce mail
  • Courier: Promptly delivers, but then quickly hides, all mail
  • Qmail: Might actually receive mail from DJB. The rest of the world will receive rude, copyrighted bounce messages.
  • Exchange: Storing mail is irrelevant since the server isn’t up often enough to actually receive any. This server is also perfectly secure unless it is running.

Switched to Serendipity!

Software, The ChangeLog, ,

Well, finally! I’ve switched to Serendipity!

The best part: comment spam blocking that works. So to those of you that had trouble commenting on this site… try again. It should just work! (And I’m sorry you had to put up with the hassle so long.)

Serendipity is a very nice system. I’m glad I chose it. And the support from Garvin and the others has been great too.

I’m running 1.0beta2 and have found a few bugs, but nothing serious.

As I mentioned before, I wrote a tool in Haskell to convert posts, comments, and categories from Drupal to Serendipity. If you use darcs, you can fetch it with:

darcs get --partial http://darcs.complete.org/unmaintained/blogcvt

The darcs-impaired may download a tarball.

I’ve chosen Serendipity

Software, The ChangeLog

I wrote the other day that I was considering Serendipity, and had a few concerns about it.

Those concerns have now been pretty well resolved.

I also looked at WordPress. It looked like it had more features, but the whole lack of a central plugin store bothered me. I’d have to scour all over the net to find plugins, and half of them are just on a random person’s blog. Very few mentioned support for WordPress 2.0; most were for 1.5.

Then I looked at anti-spam options in both. The major anti-spam plugin for WordPress had two big strikes against it, in my mind: it’s not Free software, and it doesn’t work with PostgreSQL.

I am really ticked off by webapps that only support MySQL. There is no reason not to support PostgreSQL (especially when WordPress itself does).

So I am going with Serendipity.

Now, I have to write a Drupal to Serendipity conversion tool.

Initial thoughts about Serendipity

Software

I downloaded Serendipity 1.0beta2 over the weekend and started trying it out.

My initial thought after setting it up was: *wow*. It really is incredibly easy to set up. No hand-editing of config files. No weird menus or scattering things all about. The whole system speaks of elegance and good coding practices. Except the fact that it ships some files world-writable in the tarball.

As I looked at it some more, I noticed a few problems, though. I submitted bugs or feature requests to the project as appropriate, and am including links to them here:

  • No option to display the number of reads for each story. SF 1459385
  • No tracking of HTTP referers (or, at least, no integrated interface for viewing them). SF 1459389
  • Spartacus, the tool to automatically download and install new plugins over the Web, was broken. The netmirror.org site was unresponsive and the s9y.org site gave a 404 to it. SF 1459370
  • It doesn’t seem to offer an RSS feed for the comments on individual posts. SF 1459391
  • There’s no RSS feed for individual categories. SF 1167982
  • Captcha support is built-in, but seems broken out of the box. (It rejected every attempt to post). SF 1459374

Despite these problems, this looks like a very strong contender. And I was using a beta.

Next up for testing: WordPress.

Tuttle, OK city manager offered choice about being an idiot

Online Life, Society, Software, ,

I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over “renegade” Linux maker. Quite hilarious.

Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city’s webpage wasn’t working right. He got the default “test page” for the Apache webserver on CentOS.

Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy — he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.

Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: “I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove ‘your software’ that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this ‘hacking.'”

The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):

If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.

Your choice.

Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.

He’s probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn’t giving his employees the “feeling that we’re ‘working together'” (see that link).

Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?

Something other than Drupal

Software, The ChangeLog

I’ve been using Drupal for this blog for most of its life. However, I’m starting to be quite annoyed by several things:

  • The Captcha module is seriously broken and opens up the door for various security problems
  • The Spam module is there, and works mostly, but is not effective enough to keep spam down
  • The badbehavior module is over-aggressive and doesn’t work well anyway
  • Spam becomes a serious drag on load of the server

So I’m planning to switch to something else. Something where blogging will be fun again, without all the hassle of tracking down spam. It looks like either WordPress or Serendipity, and I’m leaning towards Serendipity for now.