gary’s web sofa

I was in PC World the other day and I picked up an Acer Aspire One A110 on sale. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth now, so they were selling the 1GB RAM/16GB SSD/Linux ones for €200. It’ll do the job for web & email when I’m out ‘n about.

The factory installed Linpus distro is OK-ish, but it doesn’t get upgraded as new versions of the component software gets released, so still includes Firefox 2, rather than 3. Also, it tries to simplify things too much.

I tried installing XP Home, which isn’t as easy as you’d think because there’s no optical drive. I followed this guide to installing XP using a USB key, and after an age (well 2 1/2 hours actually) I had a working XP install. The problem is that this isn’t the speediest of hardware (the SSD in particular is woefully slow) so there’s a huge amount of tricks and hacks to get it running at an acceptable speed. In the end I decided to revert to Linux.

There are a few distros tweaked to run well on these systems. About the best is Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It’s an official branch of Ubuntu, so gets continuous support/maintenance. I ditched Evolution for Thunderbird, but other than that it’s pretty much perfect out of the box.

Aaaagggghhh

Why is it that VMware hide their VMware server downloads behind a password?

Like many I run headless Linux servers without a GUI installed. I’d like to be able to download VMware Server (700MB+) using wget via an SSH session, but I can’t because you need to log in first, and it’s not a vanilla HTTP login that I can work through wget either! I’m expected to log into the site on my desktop, download the installer and then SFTP it up to the Linux box. That would be OK if the server was on the same LAN, but it’s in a data centre and I’m on the end of an ADSL line with a 672Kbps upload. Surely controlling access to the serial numbers is good enough as the installer is useless without it. Still, at least I could use w3m in the end.

A friend of mine has a successful small company. He’s realised that he needs “backup” because he knows he’ll go out of business if he loses his data. He claims that he doesn’t have the budget for online backup, and his staff aren’t computer literate enough to be trusted to swap a backup tape and store it off site.

I decided to use him as a guinea pig for Restore, and open source client-server disk backup platform. He has a reasonably powerful server in the office (I bought it for him) and a web hosting account with 10GB of space (also thanks to me). I wanted to set it up so it would backup the desktops to disk on the server, which I’d then rsync off-site. I’ve used VMware Server a lot, so the plan was to take Restore’s “VMware Appliance”, drop it on the server as a totally self contained virtual server, spend a 1/2 hour configuring it and I could go back to the day job.

It didn’t work out that way. The VM was created using VMware Workstation 6, whose VMs are incompatible with VMware Server 1.X. All they needed to do was click “VM” > “Upgrade or Change Hardware” before publishing the VM and everything would be fine. Now my 30 minute favour for a friend will balloon into a 3 hour job because I need to install it the old fashioned way. Grrrr!

Yawn! Yet another press release masquerading as news. This time StatCounter, an Irish provider of web bugs are bemoaning the fact that the majority of Irish publicly quoted companies aren’t using their service. Instead they’re using their server logs to track visitors, which is “complex, time-consuming and limited in what it revealed about visitors”. This is patently untrue. Even free stats packages like AWStats can track everything StatCounter can, and more besides. Now I may be a bit naïve, but why would you place an advert on your company’s website for a 3rd party (they track page hits by means of an embedded image, which just happens to be an advert that you have no control over), when any competent server administrator can install and configure AWStats in 10 minutes flat?

SiliconRepublic.com: Irish Stock Exchange firms not tracking web visitors

Once I got Debian installed it was time to install VMware Server on the box. There’s two gotchas however.

1. While the application is fully 64 bit, the installer isn’t quite, and the error it throws isn’t the most illuminating.  You need to install 32 bit support by running “apt-get install ia32-utils”
2. You can’t connect to your freshly minted VMware server with the VMware Server Console. You get the error “There was a problem connecting: Cannot connect to host X.X.X.X: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”. It’s because VMware-mui hooks into inetd, which doesn’t get installed in a bare-bones Debian Etch 64 bit system. “apt-get install inetutils-inetd” is the quick fix.