Easton's blog

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.

New wrap on my Xbox 360:

Haven't posted in a bit, thought I'd tell everyone that I'm still alive. Schools started again, so that'll take some time away from coding. New motherboard has been running superbly. One of my other computers with an Asus P4PE board has a voice over when it's booting. So the other day, it's booting up and I hear voices coming from the headset. Finally figure out it's the BIOS that's speaking to me. I will say that I do admire my Solaris server. It's quite rock-solid (well, other than the random reboots when untar'ing something large) and everything feels like it's complete.

Other than that, life's been the same. My breadboard came in a little while ago so I've been experimenting with IC's and such. 

Well, back to doing nothing.

I've had these Xeon processors sitting around for a while now and I thought it's about time to get a motherboard for them. Two are clocked at 3.0Ghz/1MB/800, other two are at 2.8Ghz/512/533. I ordered a Super Micro X6DVL-EG2  from eBay for $120 of which I seen this motherboard up to $250. Anyway, came the other day and finally put it together. Heatsinks didn't screw into the case as it should, so I had to screw the nut right onto the heatsink. 

I wanted to set up a development server to test more intensive PHP applications, and also a sandbox so I opted to get a typical web server stack on Solaris.

First thing's first: grab nginx from  Cool Stack page. There's some great packages there, like Apache, PHP and MySQL all in one. I decided to go with nginx for something light and something new. 

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.

Now, I'm not one to blog about the newest tech news or anything, but Apple has released iOS 4.0.1 which as they say, "improves the formula used to calculate the appropriate bars for signal strength". Available in iTunes and here. I've always had a cheap plastic case on mine, so I never noticed any reception loss greatly. Although if I do hold it in my left hand for an extended period, I saw 5 bars go to 1 bar.

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.

With my iPhone 3G jailbroken with iOS 4.0, lots of other users have been experienced cell phone reception trouble. I tried it myself and covered the left side and saw my signal bars drop by 4. I've read around the internet and its rumoured that 4.01 was supposed to drop today to fix the antenna issues. I'd assume before Friday, there's going to be a fix out there. I, myself, didn't have too much trouble with getting a signal.