So, I have this old Pentium 166 box laying around, so I thought I'd stick Linux on it (of course). At first, I used DeLi Linux and it ran quite well. The problem is, the project changed directions, to ConnochaetOS. They took a more modern take on things, using kernel 2.6 and other modern applications. Most of the newer applications don't run quite well on an older box. So, after finding a mirror of a DeLi Linux that I cloned to a local server, I now had a working respository.

Sick of compiling istatd on every server that I want to be monitored, I finally got around to create a Debian package. Hopefully I did everything by the books, liscensing wise. Check the file attachments to download.

Since the DeLi Linux project is no more, there's no updated packages. Of course, one could upgrade to ConnochaetOS but that's no fun. The packages for ConnochaetOS are .pkg.tar.xz, which don't install in DeLi for som reason. Anyway, I compiled a couple packages just to test out the Arch packaging system. Here's a repository for those still using DeLi since the DeLi site is down.

See attachements.

Sweet and salty popcorn best describes Nexenta. OpenSolaris kernel but still using many GNU tools and such: the best of both worlds. The balls robustness of Solaris with easiness of the GNU userland, Debian to be specific, makes it easy to use Solaris. I've just got it running and I quite love it. I love Debian by itself, especially for apt-get.

After experimenting with Solaris 10 for a bit, I thought I'd get iStat on there so I can see it's activity on my iPhone. After getting down and dirty with Solaris for a bit, I definitely learned some things. Since iStat needed libxml2, I grabbed that from Sun Freeware and installed it fine. Next thing was to, of course, install the iStat client. When I ran ./configure it was complaining about not being able to create a C++ executable. And with gcc already installed, libraries were the issue. /usr/bin/crle -c /var/ld/ld.config -l /lib:/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/ssl/lib did the trick.

One of my most favourite apps for my iPhone is iStat. It lets me monitor all my *nix servers in a beautiful interface. For my Linux clients, all I had to do was download the client, extract and compile. And since my router is running pfSense (FreeBSD 7.2) I thought I might as well get iStat on there.

Apparently, the developers edition of pfSense has all the goodies to compile stuff. Without even thinking of cross compiling, I quickly set up a VM of FreeBSD 7.1 (I know little to nothing of FreeBSD so I opted to get something near 7.2) and started to compile it. I had to get libxml2 first though and for FreeBSD 7. Anyway, logged into pfSense via SSH, fetch'd libxml2 and installed it. Now, since my router had nothing to compile packages with, I built iStat in the FreeBSD virtual machine and transfered the resulting mess to pfSense via SFTP. Now, since I couldn't have run make install in pfSense, I had to create /usr/local/etc/istat.conf and filled it in with the configuration file from another Linux client. I also edited the configuration file to fit the network interface (xl0 instead of eth0).

Looking back, I probably could have done things a little different. Either way, I got the job done. Now I'm happy that I can monitor my entire network with one app. I recommend for those that are in need of a functional server monitor to check out iStat for the iPhone. Be warned that iStat only supports one interface so far.

So, I installed VMWare Server on my Windows Server 2003 box the other day. Downloaded a Debian Lenny image and got it running. Never dealt with VMWare Server so it's pretty neat to configure virtual machines from a convenient web interface. The web interface was having issues at first, of which I tracked down to IIS. The web UI runs on port 8333 and IIS runs on port 80 of course. Disabled IIS and the web UI was up and running.

After that it was all down hill. Set the network adapter on the VM to bridged. Got the virtual machine running and started installing packages and such. At first, it couldn't resolve names so I had to correct /etc/resolv.conf and point it to my DNS servers. 

So I came upon an app the other day while browsing on my iPhone. iStat. It monitors your uptime, network I/O, RAM usage, etc.. There was another app that just needed SSH access but that was another $2. Anyways, iStat has a Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris port of the agent. Just simply install the agent on your boxen and done!

It's pretty simple to get it working, I'll go over the steps that I used on Lenny.

Grab the latest release here (at this time, 0.5.4), and extract it somewhere. For me to get it working in Debian, I had to install the libxml2-dev package first. Go ahead and type 

Then

^{Photo by vfowler}

I've come to realize that no one reads a blog where people (such as me) babbles on about their life. Know why? No one cares. People dig tutorials on the internet, if they wanted to read stories they'd pick up a book.

I'm in the process of upgrading my Hackintosh from 10.5.2 to 10.6. Shouldn't be too much of a pain in the ass, but oh well.

I've gotten a serial terminal working on my Thinkpad. I can know get a [virtual] terminal, via serial to one of my servers which is great. I could SSH into them, but plugging shit in is much more fun. I'd suggest those who want a quick terminal to check this out.
 

^{Photo by psilver}
I'll skip the whole 'I haven't posted for two weeks' intro. 

It's only October and it already snowed, a couple of inches and it's still here. Mornings are sure colder.

I finally put together my new fileserver, and up  from my one harddrive server before. I was going to do a RAID1 configuration, but instead went back to a normal partitioning setup (XFS on the secondary HDD for the files). Recieved another computer the other day, so I'm at a total of 7 servers.

I was planning on installing Darwin (hehe) on one of the faster ones, but I can't get this damn DVD is fried (for whatever reason). I'm hoping that it has CPU instructions for SSE2/3.