gary’s web sofa

Aaaaaggghhh!!!!! My house is totally 802.11g. There’s a server, a few desktops, a laptop and even a couple of PDAs around and there’s no way the ball & chain would allow CAT5 tacked to the skirting boards. 54Mbs is the theoretical maximum, but that never happens. Most of the time I just move email and web stuff around, so it’s not a big deal. The only exception is when I’m moving video between my laptop and my desktop. The desktop supports gigabit Ethernet, but the laptop is 10/100 only. Both have FireWire built in (very handy for iPods and pulling video off DV camcorders) and Windows XP supports TCP/IP over the link, so I can use it as a quick and dirty 400Mbs LAN point to point network. At least I could….

I “upgraded” to Vista a couple of months ago and it’s a crock, but it’s not enough of a crock to make me reinstall XP Pro. Today was the first time I wanted to move a serious chunk of data between my laptop and the desktop. I plugged the cable in and nothing happened. Then I remembered that seeing as I formatted and reinstalled the desktop, I’d need to set n IP address, so I went into the network and sharing center in control panel….. The wireless adapter was there, as was the wired NIC, but no sign of the FireWire interface. I knew the FireWire card was set up because my iPod has been connected since the upgrade, so I checked Google to see if anyone else had the same problem. I found this. Microsoft removed the feature because they have “not identified any customer dependency” on this feature. Bastards!

VMWare Server includes the ability to only allocate disk space on the host system as needed. For example, if the virtualised system has a 8GB disk but only uses 4GB, then the disk image only takes up 4GB. While the disk image will expand as required, it won’t automatically reduce. The VMWare Tools application allows you to shrink it back on demand, but it’s a GUI app, which is fine if you’re running Windows, or Unix/Linux with X, but sod all use if you like to run your Linux VMs as lean as possible, without X.

VMWare Command Line Tools from VM Back is an unofficial open source command line version of VMWare Tools that enables you to shrink your disk images and sync your clocks on any Linux, DOS, BSD or Solaris VM.

I’ve finally got it down to a 5 minute process with the help of the OpenNMS docs….

Install a bare-bones Etch system by skipping the role and package selection screens during the installation.

Edit the apt sources.list to include the “contrib” and “non-free” packages by adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main

Run “apt-get update” to get the package list up to date.

Run “apt-get install sun-java5-jdk” to install Sun Java

The JAVA_HOME environment variable needs to be set for any Java app to run so adding the following to /etc/profile will do the trick

JAVA_HOME=”/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun”
export JAVA_HOME

Run “apt-get install tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps” to install Tomcat

Run “apt-get install wget unzip” to install wget so we can download jbilling from the server, and unzip so we can decompress the archive.

“cd /opt” and run “wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/jbilling/jbilling-1_0_6.zip” to download it and “unzip jbilling-1_0_6.zip” to decompress it.

Edit /opt/jbilling/server/default/conf/jbilling.properties to suit.

Run “chmod 700 /opt/jbilling/bin/*.sh” so we can start and stop the server easily.

Run “/opt/jbilling/bin/run.sh” to start the service and then open http://<IP_Address>/billing/signupEntity.do?action=setup in a web browser and follow the Getting Started Guide here.

I was in my local video rental shop and they had a stack of WoW 14 day trial packs on the counter for ???????2 each. Seeing as I know at least one guy who doesn’t go outside the door at the weekend any more because he spends every waking moment online, I decided to give it a spin.

I know my PC isn’t the latest and greatest (a self built AMD Athlon 3700+), but it took 20 minutes to install this from DVD, and then it went down hill from there. I ran the game, created my account and logged in. I then got kicked out to download a patch to v1.12.0. This 485MB file took 2 hours to download… Finally! I can log in!…. I logged in and the same thing happened again. This time a 600MB+ v2.0.1 patch, which I left running overnight. This morning I logged in to see if it was finished…. It had! Result!!!…. but now it needs to down 200MB+ of other patches….. Hopefully I’ll actually be able to spend some of the 14 days playing the game, and not just watching progress bars while stuff downloads.

I’m setting up a VM on my VMware server to manage network backups. Asigra Televaulting is an agentless backup client that stores the data on offsite disk rather than on tape or local disk. Your backups are pretty useless if they burn up in the same fire that destroys your PC. The idea is for the VM to be in suspend until needed, thus not impacting performance of the other VMs. A command in the crontab will resume the VM in time to hit the schedule. I’ll then use Asigra’s pre/post job scripting functionality to suspend the VM when the backup is finished.
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