Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

This Friday I received a box with several new computer components from our supplier NXSource, the business end of NCIX. I’m currently in the process of performing several new system builds and overwhelmingly chose the Asus P5Q series, in both -VM and -E based configurations.

As per its extension, the P5Q-VM will be going in an office/lower end configuration with no need for a discrete graphics card. It’s replacing a Sempron 2400+ configuration; the MSI Socket 462 board blew two or three capacitors last week and there’s not really a point in finding a replacement motherboard now. The onboard video from the Intel chipset should be sufficient for its purpose in life, and the board has a DVI-D port unlike similar systems with integrated graphics.

Eventually the machine may be repurposed with media center-type functionality, so all it should need is a DVI to HDMI conversion cable to connect to a HDTV. I did slightly overspec the processor (a Core 2 Duo E7200 at 2.53GHz) so that it could run 720p video without issues; in general, at least a 2.4GHz dual core is the baseline for decent playback of most popular MKV’s.

One nice thing about the new Asus microATX configurations is that they include an x16 PCI-Express slot for potential future expansion, as well as four DDR2 SDRAM slots instead of just two. This makes the configuration incredibly useful in the future when it comes time for a RAM upgrade.

I’ve replaced the P5B Deluxe pictured above and taken the new P5Q-E for my main workstation. The new board is now essentially the same platform as the file/media server upstairs. I’d originally chosen the board for its three PCI-E x16 slots, which makes powering a video card and two PCI-E RAID addon boards a possibility. One feature that I’d neglected to investigate is the instant-on “Splashtop/Express Gate”, which is basically a stripped down version of Linux partially embedded on a flash chip on the board. I can see this feature being really useful, but it has a few drawbacks:

• Installation is performed through Windows. You have to have a hard drive for the initial installation, which doesn’t really make sense when it comes to grabbing drivers or BIOS updates. Ideally, the motherboard utilities DVD would allow you to boot a read-only version or install the environment to a USB thumb drive. From there you could pull the latest BIOS, upgrade, and grab new drivers even before Windows enters the picture.
• I’d like to see more motherboard utilities included in the package. A temperature gauge, overclock tweaking utility and network cable tester would all be excellent additions.
• While on that subject, tools similar to SpeedFan, Orthos and Prime95 are sorely lacking.
• Where’s the music support? You’ve initialized the sound card, now get to business with it. Embedded Linux with a jukebox - even XMMS - would be really neat.
• Hard drives with NTFS show up in the Picture Browser, but there’s no way to even view their contents through the conventional USB drive explorer.
• Also, give us a command line and non-gimped web browser! The lack of console support in an OS that’s so obviously Linux hurts me.

All in all, the features of the stripped-down distribution make me want to try out Ubuntu again outside of a VM.

Yesterday I asked around on twitter about any sort of software that provided linux/mac style virtual/multiple desktop support for Vista. I was abruptly met with “No.” and a “Get a mac.” as responses.

Fortunately, Google is my friend - and failing my friends suggestions, I did a couple quick searches for the software in question. I found two solutions, neither of which really did what I wanted to - but they’re useful none the less: VirtuaWin and Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager. Both are open source, the former on sourceforge, the later on codeplex.

They both manage to provide multiple virtual desktop managers, but they only allocate windows to each of these virtual desktops - while I was looking for a solution in which each desktop could have separate desktop shortcuts. Regardless, they are neat apps.

Download VirtuaWin
Download Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager

Just checked out the Eclipse SVN site and apparently the issue with dashes in new PHP filenames has been resolved. I upgraded my work copy to the latest nightly build and things seem to be going well. (The October 1st integration build might be better stability-wise, but I’ve had good luck with the nightly builds.)

For the record, after the upgrade, loading my workspace took about five minutes (Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz, 1GB RAM) with no discernable progress bar or CPU activity. Eclipse effectively looks like it’s frozen. Be patient; it’ll load eventually.

PDT, though, is about the single most useful tool I find for PHP development at work. The next front-runner is WinSCP, which has a really neat feature, Keep remote directory up to date:

This feature lets you have complete synchronization between a remote SFTP server and your local Eclipse workspace. It also supports private key encryption.

As a pair to WinSCP, I also use PuTTY, with anywhere from one to five sessions open at a time. PuTTY offers a neat tunnelling option, which I’ve mentioned before.

You can also access internal servers using one of these tunnels; for example, if I want to connect to a remote desktop session on host 192.168.1.101:3389 on my internal network, I’d use the following syntax:

Source port: 127.0.0.2:3389
Destination: 192.168.1.101:3389

Then, after establishing the SSH connection, using the 127.0.0.2 alias in Remote Desktop lets me connect to the machine behind the NAT traversal firewall.

Notepad++ is another program I highly recommend as a replacement for Notepad. If you can’t use TextMate because you’re not on a Mac, Notepad++ is an acceptable substitute. It offers some neat syntax highlighting features, and saves session history even when you exit.

Paint.NET is also a decent image editor, allowing you to verify hex values for colours and perform some minor tweaks to images without incurring the load time and aggravations in Photoshop.

I am either about to become one of the hardcore neckbeard-wielding Linux supporters, or do something drastic to Microsoft’s programmers. Why is it that an operating system like Vista, put together after five years of effort, is actually WORSE than its predecessor?

Just this week I’ve experienced the following issues with my legitimate, genuine MSDNAA Vista Business installation:

• Random nVidia kernel driver crashes. I don’t actually see the crashes themselves, only the tray tooltips that follow them indicating that “nvkdtm” or some similarly-named file has caused my display device to stop working. I could theoretically pin this on nVidia, but the drivers I’m using are WHQL certified.
• My user profile refuses to log in with my preferences. My desktop wallpaper, Start menu customizations, etc… are all gone, and I’m told to check the Event Log to find out what’s wrong. There is nothing useful in the Event Log.
• SMB file sharing just randomly crashed, interrupting a download and halting my music. I go to investigate this and Windows indicates that everything is fine. Except it’s not.
• Remote Desktop can take up to two minutes to log in, where XP would accomplish the same task in two seconds.
• Windows Explorer duplicates folders on the root of the drive. I have two entries of the same “Users” folder present when I look at the C drive.

This has all been just this week.

What am I doing then? I’m reinstalling XP Pro from the latest newsgroup build - the pirates build an ISO every month with the latest Windows Update fixes, giving a better installation source than my pre-SP1 media.

I’m also refusing to touch the OS with a ten foot pole until I can verify that all this crap has been fixed. It’s not like I’m running exotic hardware (Asus board, Intel Core 2 Duo chip, OCZ RAM, nVidia graphics) and I haven’t actually touched the box since two weeks ago - all it’s been used for is web browsing and SMB serving.

When the final release Ubuntu 7.04 comes out in a few more days, I will seriously consider it for regular use.

When I get a bit more cash, I will seriously consider a Mac Pro instead.

In my last post, I detailed the way in which you could activate the Analog statistics application on DreamHost accounts with root WordPress installations. I’m really not a fan of Analog, though - my preferred application for statistics tracking is Webalizer.

I’ll describe the best way to install Webalizer in this shared hosting environment, with information distilled from the DreamHost Customer Support Wiki.

First, you’ll need shell (SSH) access to your Dreamhost account. Once you’ve logged in, carry out the following tasks:

1. Make a new directory in your home path called webalizer. Also make a new directory for your domain’s statistics.
   

   mkdir ~/webalizer
mkdir ~/example.com/webalizer

2. Change to the directory.
   

   cd ~/webalizer

3. Open a new links browser instance to the Webalizer download page.
   

   links http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/download.html

4. When Links opens, press Enter to bypass the information box if it appears.
5. Arrow down to the Linux ELF - Binary x86 link. (You don’t need the static binary.) Press d to download the file, and then press Enter to save the .tgz file.
6. Once the file is downloaded, press q and then Enter to exit Links.
7. Extract the .tgz file (change the version number if necessary).
   

   tar -zxf webalizer-2.01-10-linuxelf-x86-bin.tgz

8. Move the contents of the versioned Webalizer directory to the ~/webalizer directory, and delete the version numbered extraction directory.
   

   mv webalizer-2.01-10-linuxelf-x86/* .
rm -rf webalizer-2.01-10-linuxelf-x86/

9. Copy the sample.conf file to a new file with your domain name.
   

   cp sample.conf example.com.conf

10. Edit the example.com.conf file using your preferred editor. You will want to uncomment and change the following lines to reflect the DreamHost configuration:
    

    TheLogFile line should read:
    LogFile /home/username/logs/example.com/http/access.log.0

    The OutputDir command should be:
    OutputDir /home/username/example.com/webalizer/

    The Incremental option should be enabled:
    Incremental yes

    And the IncrementalName directive should be uncommented:
    IncrementalName webalizer.current

11. Save the file, then run the webalizer application:
    

    ./webalizer -c example.com.conf

12. Browse to your site’s webalizer directory and view the statistics. The URL is:
    

    http://example.com/webalizer/

In order to retrieve each day’s statistics and have Webalizer parse them, you need to set up a cronjob to automatically run each day after midnight. 2 AM is about the best bet for the cycle to run.

1. Set your EDITOR variable to vi, so that your commands all are on the same line.
   

   export EDITOR=vi

2. Edit your crontab file:
   

   crontab -e

3. Add the following line to the crontab file. (Press i for Insert mode to begin typing in vi. To exit, type :wq.)
   

   0 2 * * * /home/username/webalizer/webalizer -c /home/username/webalizer/example.com.conf >/dev/null 2>&1

Your cronjob will now run at 2AM every day, processing the previous day’s log entries.

If you want to secure your /webalizer/ directory from prying eyes, you can create a .htaccess file under ~/example.com/webalizer/ with the following information:

AuthName "Webalizer Statistics"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /home/username/example.com.stats.htpasswd
Require valid-user

Then, use Apache’s htpasswd tool to create the .htpasswd file:

htpasswd -c /home/username/example.com.stats.htpasswd useraccount

You will be prompted for a password for the user account. To add more users to this file, run the htpasswd command without the -c flag:

htpasswd /home/username/example.com.stats.htpasswd anotheruser

While there’s a lot of information to digest, Webalizer is an excellent tool for tracking web statistics and the user interface is slightly more friendly than Analog. I plan to use the two applications concurrently - Analog seems to do a better job of tracking referral URLs and Webalizer provides colourful graphs.

Update 3/07/2007: I’ve updated the crontab section to reflect that the full /home/username/webalizer/example.com.conf path needs to be passed for the -c flag.

I’ve always seemed to have more trouble setting up monitors and displays under Linux than should be warranted. Cobbling together a few forum posts from Google, here’s what I’ve come up with in xorg.conf that seems to have my VX2025wm working at native 1680×1050@60Hz resolution. You may not need the ModeLine parameter, depending on how your monitor is hooked up - mine runs through a KVM box that doesn’t much like passing resolutions > 1280×1024. Get the changes and xorg.conf after the jump…
Continue reading ‘VX2025wm and Ubuntu 6.10’ »