So I finally got started w/ the Linux From Scratch project for Dulcea. Last night I got to the point where I can chroot into the stuff I have compiled so far (the compiler and file utilities, basically). Its going mostly smoothly but it is a fairly long process. My SBU is around 1m20s.
Anyhow, there were a few hiccups with my hardware setup and configuration... Firstly since I was doing most of this stuff remotely from work, I had to make sure I set GRUB to boot Linux by default. Well, I tweaked my networks cards and rebooted to make sure they perform as expected on boot and, guess what, Dulcea booted to windows.
Go me!
So on the topic of network cards, Dulcea has three. eth0 is the on-board NIC which you may remember as being scragged. eth1 and eth2 are both SMC PCI Full-Duplex 100Mbps cards (the 1211TX and 1244TX). Since I need to diffrentiate between the two I wrote the MAC IDs on the back of them. Pretty clever, da? It would have been if I hadn't mixed the two MAC IDs up...
Well after getting that sorted out I now have eth1 set as my external interface. Nikita is statically allocating it 192.168.0.2 and thus Dulcea deserves an entry in the hosts file. eth2 is the internal interface which Dulcea statically sets to 192.168.1.1. Oooo, aahhh. Different subnets.
With the network cards sorted out I cranked open my fstab on Dulcea because the NFS mounts are always mis-behaving. After looking at my entries and reading the mount and fstab properties carefully, I finaly have entries that load nfs mounts consistently and correctly on startup:
nikita:/home /home nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
nikita:/home/share /mnt/share nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
nikita:/home/ftp /mnt/ftp nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
With basic system config crap out of the way (and grub.conf edited to boot linux by default so I can reboot remotely) I started into compiling my 1337 warez for Linux From Scratch (lfs docs available from www.linuxfromscratch.org).
Talk about a lot of slogging. I followed the directions to the letter. It is going smoothly but I am only just through chapter 5 which is compiling the tools required to compile (and the first mess is compiled statically).
So today I hope to put all the commands in a script file so I can just fire and forget. And also so I have the script file for if/when I build another LFS system.
Sunday, 11 May 2003
Tuesday, 6 May 2003
More Gear
Mmmm New hardware. Tastes just like chicken.
So I made another trip out to NCIX to get the last couple of things I need to trick-out Dulcea for becomming the disciple server. A new large HD and a PCI NIC (in addition to the one she already has).
Got us a nice Western Digital Caviar JB series drive. This one is 7200 rpm, ATA 100 (didn't see any 133s around), 9ms avg seek, and a 8 mb cache. Its wery nace.
Heh. I didn't realize that Dulcea was actually using her secondary drive for Linux. Its a crap drive and I thought Linux was just on a partition (or three) on the main disk. Come boot time, not GRUB for you. In short, I got to "upgrade" from Redhat 8.0 to Redhat 9. As with Chevette, the upgrade wasn't very exciting. At least RH 9 comes w/ the 2.4.20 kernel.
Anyhow, the NIC I picked up was twenty bones which I guess I kinda think is fine. Not as many free PCI NICs as there are ISA NICs. Its a fair and popular chip at least. SMC 1244TX. In fact, the other NIC in Dulcea is a predacessor to that one. Its a SMC 1211TX. Both NICs are 100Mbps and support full-duplex and, uh, me ethernet 'em up good. Don't know why anyone would buy the 60-80CDN 100Mbps NICs, but apparently NCIX sells plenty of 'em.
Whoops, gtg. Gonna be late for work.
So I made another trip out to NCIX to get the last couple of things I need to trick-out Dulcea for becomming the disciple server. A new large HD and a PCI NIC (in addition to the one she already has).
Got us a nice Western Digital Caviar JB series drive. This one is 7200 rpm, ATA 100 (didn't see any 133s around), 9ms avg seek, and a 8 mb cache. Its wery nace.
Heh. I didn't realize that Dulcea was actually using her secondary drive for Linux. Its a crap drive and I thought Linux was just on a partition (or three) on the main disk. Come boot time, not GRUB for you. In short, I got to "upgrade" from Redhat 8.0 to Redhat 9. As with Chevette, the upgrade wasn't very exciting. At least RH 9 comes w/ the 2.4.20 kernel.
Anyhow, the NIC I picked up was twenty bones which I guess I kinda think is fine. Not as many free PCI NICs as there are ISA NICs. Its a fair and popular chip at least. SMC 1244TX. In fact, the other NIC in Dulcea is a predacessor to that one. Its a SMC 1211TX. Both NICs are 100Mbps and support full-duplex and, uh, me ethernet 'em up good. Don't know why anyone would buy the 60-80CDN 100Mbps NICs, but apparently NCIX sells plenty of 'em.
Whoops, gtg. Gonna be late for work.
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Check Mah 1337 G34R!
"Checkitout, checkitout, checkitout!"
So since putting in a couple quarter-gig sticks of MM in Dulcea, all my games got a whole lot more interesting :P I tells yeh, going from an eigth-gig to a half-gig was the best investment of a hundred and fifty bones I've ever put into a system.
Now stuff like D2 and DoD don't hit the freaking hd for texture maps and sounds data anywhere near as much. It all sits memory-resident. I have been nothing but eccstatic about the improvement. I noticed it as soon as the RAM was tossed in the box.
Only thing I need now before I can seriously make moves on porting Dulcea to a server is put in a nice honkin HD or two. Say an 80GB disk or two? I like the sound of that... Oh, that and she'll need a second PCI NIC since the on-bo NIC ASAD. But that'll likely cost me not a dime.
And in Nikita's news, I gots da fat Samba config going on there. I borrowed Sante's copy of the Samba book from O'Reilly. Went through that file we had scabbed off wherever and actually looked up the options I needed to have/remove.
Mostly I was removing stuff. Whether it be defaults (a bunch of options were restating defaults) or poor overrides (like map system = yes).
Heck, I even structured my Samba config file and commented it so anyone nipping it can pepper to taste.
A couple major renovations were made in there. Firstly the usage of security = user rather then share. Secondly, the use of the [homes] section.
The first actually matches usernames/passwords. Apparently all share does is check that the submitted password matches any valid password... Brutal. The most important change there was that each share now has to explicitly set valid users (or groups in most cases) which wasn't a big change since my shares were either public or restricted to certain users.
The second was the use of the super-slick [homes] section. As both Dante and the O'Reilly folks pointed out, there are a few issues with assuming that every user can access their disk space... Like say Apache shouldn't be allowed to access its 'home' directory over smb. However, that was mostly solved in relation to point one anyhow. I had created a smbusers group which was all users who may want access to the Samba resources on the lan... Eg archangel (moi), wendigo, czak, and dante. Since user level security requires I explicitly list them (add them to the smbusers group), apache and all the rest don't get homes shares anyhow.
That the news, very late, but all good anyhow.
So since putting in a couple quarter-gig sticks of MM in Dulcea, all my games got a whole lot more interesting :P I tells yeh, going from an eigth-gig to a half-gig was the best investment of a hundred and fifty bones I've ever put into a system.
Now stuff like D2 and DoD don't hit the freaking hd for texture maps and sounds data anywhere near as much. It all sits memory-resident. I have been nothing but eccstatic about the improvement. I noticed it as soon as the RAM was tossed in the box.
Only thing I need now before I can seriously make moves on porting Dulcea to a server is put in a nice honkin HD or two. Say an 80GB disk or two? I like the sound of that... Oh, that and she'll need a second PCI NIC since the on-bo NIC ASAD. But that'll likely cost me not a dime.
And in Nikita's news, I gots da fat Samba config going on there. I borrowed Sante's copy of the Samba book from O'Reilly. Went through that file we had scabbed off wherever and actually looked up the options I needed to have/remove.
Mostly I was removing stuff. Whether it be defaults (a bunch of options were restating defaults) or poor overrides (like map system = yes).
Heck, I even structured my Samba config file and commented it so anyone nipping it can pepper to taste.
A couple major renovations were made in there. Firstly the usage of security = user rather then share. Secondly, the use of the [homes] section.
The first actually matches usernames/passwords. Apparently all share does is check that the submitted password matches any valid password... Brutal. The most important change there was that each share now has to explicitly set valid users (or groups in most cases) which wasn't a big change since my shares were either public or restricted to certain users.
The second was the use of the super-slick [homes] section. As both Dante and the O'Reilly folks pointed out, there are a few issues with assuming that every user can access their disk space... Like say Apache shouldn't be allowed to access its 'home' directory over smb. However, that was mostly solved in relation to point one anyhow. I had created a smbusers group which was all users who may want access to the Samba resources on the lan... Eg archangel (moi), wendigo, czak, and dante. Since user level security requires I explicitly list them (add them to the smbusers group), apache and all the rest don't get homes shares anyhow.
That the news, very late, but all good anyhow.
Monday, 7 April 2003
Busy Days, Y'All
So been kept fairly busy and looks to be busy for some nights yet. Yay!
Tomorrow I will be catching the Cowboy Beebop flek at the Tinsletown. Should be fun stuff. Anime cowboys in space. *Shrug*
Wednesday, out for drinks on someone else's tab.
Thorsday, coding w/ dante and Nibble Night (more drinks).
Friday is the usual (more drinks).
Saturday is Vampire day, oh, shite, I need to call the GM and see if we can hold it ealier or somethin cause Xiao will be in town.
Sunday is LAN party, yo. Still have done nothing to organize it.
And all the while, I have to write the changes for Hethor and play lots of Diablo II. Sounds like a wicked good week to me.
Now since nobody in their right mind gives to breezes about my personal life, here's the Nikita News:
Samba is FND. I was tinkering with DHCP on Sunday only to kill the Samba shares by switching to a tendot network for the lan. After realizing how much relied on ips for the lan being one-nine-twos, I switched back... Samba has not returned.
Well shoot says I. Time to restructure and rebuild my Samba setup. I definately need to fix all the persmissions and such on the local system. As for the network, Nikita does not even appear in Network Neighbourhood.
I am still hoping to get dns runnign for the lan however I'm scared. Half the resources I was reading on Sunday made it look really tricky.
Well, I'll see all y'all next time and have even fewer servers working on Nikita.
Tomorrow I will be catching the Cowboy Beebop flek at the Tinsletown. Should be fun stuff. Anime cowboys in space. *Shrug*
Wednesday, out for drinks on someone else's tab.
Thorsday, coding w/ dante and Nibble Night (more drinks).
Friday is the usual (more drinks).
Saturday is Vampire day, oh, shite, I need to call the GM and see if we can hold it ealier or somethin cause Xiao will be in town.
Sunday is LAN party, yo. Still have done nothing to organize it.
And all the while, I have to write the changes for Hethor and play lots of Diablo II. Sounds like a wicked good week to me.
Now since nobody in their right mind gives to breezes about my personal life, here's the Nikita News:
Samba is FND. I was tinkering with DHCP on Sunday only to kill the Samba shares by switching to a tendot network for the lan. After realizing how much relied on ips for the lan being one-nine-twos, I switched back... Samba has not returned.
Well shoot says I. Time to restructure and rebuild my Samba setup. I definately need to fix all the persmissions and such on the local system. As for the network, Nikita does not even appear in Network Neighbourhood.
I am still hoping to get dns runnign for the lan however I'm scared. Half the resources I was reading on Sunday made it look really tricky.
Well, I'll see all y'all next time and have even fewer servers working on Nikita.
Saturday, 29 March 2003
Makin Movies, Makin Songs...
... and Foightin round the World!
So at work this week, I hack into Gary's 1337 book collection. He has a book for Linux Network Administration, or some such. It looks like a good one. I've been reading it a bit at work and I am hoping I will be able to setup some more network servers on Nikita, starting with a primary nameserver and hopefully ending up with a successful NIS setup.
"Its a long hard road out of Hell!"
There's just *piles* of stuff I know too little about. Like the 'host' command for looking up the IPs of urls. Or yp-serv for sharing user information on a network. That oughtta keep me busy in the 'slow' times at work.
In consumer business, though I have not bought anything yet, I'm also thinking about my multimedia equipment. Chiefly that I should start building a home stereo and ignore wasting cash on a portable cd/mp3 player. Sounds like fun, no? I can just replace Paul's stereo by module, starting with the amp.
Mmm and Vampire. Most of the coterie ended up owing *lots* of boons left-and-right and in return I (and my coterie) have a couple big favours to call in from a couple big sources... Hmm, we'd best figure a good way to let this city know that we did revive Archon Fedrico Di Padawah and are the ones to choose to run this show.
So at work this week, I hack into Gary's 1337 book collection. He has a book for Linux Network Administration, or some such. It looks like a good one. I've been reading it a bit at work and I am hoping I will be able to setup some more network servers on Nikita, starting with a primary nameserver and hopefully ending up with a successful NIS setup.
"Its a long hard road out of Hell!"
There's just *piles* of stuff I know too little about. Like the 'host' command for looking up the IPs of urls. Or yp-serv for sharing user information on a network. That oughtta keep me busy in the 'slow' times at work.
In consumer business, though I have not bought anything yet, I'm also thinking about my multimedia equipment. Chiefly that I should start building a home stereo and ignore wasting cash on a portable cd/mp3 player. Sounds like fun, no? I can just replace Paul's stereo by module, starting with the amp.
Mmm and Vampire. Most of the coterie ended up owing *lots* of boons left-and-right and in return I (and my coterie) have a couple big favours to call in from a couple big sources... Hmm, we'd best figure a good way to let this city know that we did revive Archon Fedrico Di Padawah and are the ones to choose to run this show.
Thursday, 27 March 2003
Argh Its Quiet!
Same-old same-old. Up to work, video games, and too little projin'. Actually, I did log some energy into the messaging design *grumble* *grumble*. That is something I really need to spend regular time at. Had a few drinks this eve so not tonight, but mayhaps tomorrow.
In Nikita news... I think I'm finally getting my expectations for a server down to a reasonable level. Chiefly: None. I'm going to stick a bigger hd in Dulcea and a mess of RAM. As for Nikita, I will swap a quieter power-supply in since her's is suffering a little of the vtol'itis. Upgrade her ram soonish. As for the storage issues, I dunno. Mayhaps I will swap my new huge drive in for the hdb and use the 20GB for Dulcea which is enough (now she has a 7GB which is weak).
And that's the news. Heck, soon I get paid and will realize some of my computer upgrades.
In Nikita news... I think I'm finally getting my expectations for a server down to a reasonable level. Chiefly: None. I'm going to stick a bigger hd in Dulcea and a mess of RAM. As for Nikita, I will swap a quieter power-supply in since her's is suffering a little of the vtol'itis. Upgrade her ram soonish. As for the storage issues, I dunno. Mayhaps I will swap my new huge drive in for the hdb and use the 20GB for Dulcea which is enough (now she has a 7GB which is weak).
And that's the news. Heck, soon I get paid and will realize some of my computer upgrades.
Saturday, 22 March 2003
Whoops, Lost a Week There
Seems that I lost a week in there somewhere. Guess I had better summarize briefly then since I have no hope of remember all the details...
Hmm. Work, games, food, repeat. Not very intersting week since I haven't done anything. Wait, LIES! I was taking a peek at Nikita's df -h during the week to find that the root partition was down to 35MB free. I started bitching and cursing and dove into rpm to start removing packages. Well, I kill rpm again thus I *really* need to start build my new server from LFS.
After hacking at rpm for a little while to no avail, one of my brilliant users pointed out that I should probably clear-out /var/log. I said to myself:
"hmm... good idead. lets du -sh... Oh shit! Its 200MB! I installed this system four weeks ago. That's 50MB a week..."
Nikita was going down by the end of the week so I moved everything in /var/log to my share partition and... symlinked /var/log to it, hehe. Symlinks rule.
So to summarize: Don't be an archangel and put your /var/log on a separate partition so that you don't fill up root and fuck-up your system. (Note the rhyme.)
Hmm. Work, games, food, repeat. Not very intersting week since I haven't done anything. Wait, LIES! I was taking a peek at Nikita's df -h during the week to find that the root partition was down to 35MB free. I started bitching and cursing and dove into rpm to start removing packages. Well, I kill rpm again thus I *really* need to start build my new server from LFS.
After hacking at rpm for a little while to no avail, one of my brilliant users pointed out that I should probably clear-out /var/log. I said to myself:
"hmm... good idead. lets du -sh... Oh shit! Its 200MB! I installed this system four weeks ago. That's 50MB a week..."
Nikita was going down by the end of the week so I moved everything in /var/log to my share partition and... symlinked /var/log to it, hehe. Symlinks rule.
So to summarize: Don't be an archangel and put your /var/log on a separate partition so that you don't fill up root and fuck-up your system. (Note the rhyme.)
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