Easton's stuff

My text storage platform project, pasteros.io is finally live! It's also on Github: https://github.com/snacsnoc/pasteros

There are countless tools and software stacks out there to monitor your servers out, though some are not the easiest to setup. I went with Nagios since it's straightforward to configure and easy to setup. For reference, I used Nagios 4.0.8 on Debian 7 using Debian 7 slaves. The Nagios master node already had lighttpd and PHP set up so I'll gloss over that.

Master node

Start by downloading Nagios and Nagios plugins:

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagios/nagios-4.0.8.tar.gz
wget http://nagios-plugins.org/download/nagios-plugins-2.0.3.tar.gz

Extract, compile and install Nagios:

 I have recently discovered the Nimrod programming language. I usually don't branch out on languages because, well, stuff you don't know can be scary. I'm surprised how easy it is to get going though, it reminds me quite a bit of Python. I put up a test project on Github that fetches the weather for a given location.

 SnackLinux finally has a domain, snacklinux.org! The source is still on Github and all the ISO images have moved as well.

 For the most part, SnackLinux works. I've been having problems with Busybox, so I've made packages for coreutils, binutils, sed, grep and gawk. When compiling anything, I get:

segfault at 0 ip    (null) sp bfdb1cbc error 4 in busybox[8048000+e8000]

or something along the lines of that. I used the newest Buildroot, 2013.11, to create a new toolchain and cross compile uClibc 0.9.33 for SnackLinux. I have yet to recompile Busybox yet, but I'm working on getting gcc natively working on SnackLinux. Once that is completed, I should be able to compile SnackLinux from within SnackLinux.

 I recently bought another IBM Model M (1395660) on eBay the other day, not thinking that it is actually a terminal keyboard. I thought it has a detachable SDL cable like my current Model M (1391401). I was wrong. Turns out it has a non-removable RJ-45 plug instead, thus being a terminal keyboard. Well, aftering some researching, some were able to get it to work by using an ATMega. I was able to find a pinout of the RJ45 plug on the keyboard, and simply just wire it up to a PS/2 cable. Though apparently, the colour of wire for PS/2 is not standardized, which led to testing each pin to see what it does. I cannibalized an old Microsoft keyboard for the cable and was able to hook the wires up straight to each other.

 Four months later and I finally updated SnackLinux. I changed  SnackLinux from a ramdisk to initramfs, updated the Linux 3.10.1 and cleaned up how things build. The full project is available on my Bitbucket and ISOs are available to download here.

 I've spent the last week or two working on SnackLinux, a small Linux distro. I managed to get uClibc in there, as well as tcc, which makes it somewhat useful. The source of it all is there, so you can compile the distro yourself (sans the packages). There are also ISOs which you can download here and fire them up in a virtual machine.

 The processor on the Raspberry Pi isn't all that fast, so why not offload it? I have a HP ML350 that is mostly idling, except when I need to use PostgreSQL, so I thought to set it up as a desktop server for my Pi.

I set up a RDP server since it works well with Linux and also Windows. First thing's first, install xrdp and all other dependencies:

apt-get install build-essential libpam0g-dev libssl-dev x11vnc vncviewer fakeroot checkinstall x11vnc xrdp rdesktop

Then, install your desktop of choice. I chose XFCE since it's pretty lightweight

apt-get install xfce4

I've had problems getting it to start X remotely, so I fixed it with the following. Do this in the user's account (/home/pi for example)

touch .Xauthority

chmod 600 .Xauthority