PacketCollision

I was having trouble getting my Lion machine to connect to my fileserver via NFS. It turns out the fix is really easy, once you find the random forum discussion that mentions what config you need to change.

In your /etc/exports file on the server, add “insecure” to the options, which just means that requests are allowed to come from ports >1024, which apparently the NFS client on mac does. It’s not actually insecure.
My exports file now looks like this:
/data 172.16.42.0/24(rw,async,root_squash,no_subtree_check,insecure)

YOURLS is a simple php package that lets you set up your own URL shortener, avoiding privacy issues and problems with a shortener going out of  business. I use it on pcurl.us, but with my recent server move I’m switching all of my sites to Nginx, which requires converting apache rewrite rules to Nginx versions.

The official suggestion on the YOURLS site involves heavy use of ifs, which is discouraged in nginx, and is also missing support for info pages and case-sensitive short urls. I wrote a new version, that was better, but it was still more complex than I liked. In setting up another instance for one of the people I host though, I realized that YOURLS has actually made my job a lot easier than I thought. The updated config is below:

server {
  listen 178.33.177.161:80;
  server_name pcurl.us;
  access_log off;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/pcurl.us.error.log;
  root /var/www/pcurl.us/htdocs;
  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /yourls-loader.php;
    location ~ \.php$ {
      fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
      fastcgi_index  index.php;
      fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
      include        fastcgi_params;
    }
  }
}

I’m in the middle of moving all of our various sites over to a new server (a big beefy gentoo box at OVH), and it’s going mostly smoothly. I’ve taken the opportunity to simplify many of our configs, but also attempted to make it more secure and reliable. I’m hoping to make use of lxc and some of the new security capabilities in the kernel, and so far having the Gentoo ecosystem behind me has been a big help.

This site is on the new box, but many other things are still in flux.

I recently traded my old Dell XPS Gen2 for a Panasonic ToughBook CF-28.  I was really looking for a laptop that had a serial port (USB dongles just don’t work as reliably), and since I wanted to be able to use it out in the field, a ToughBook seemed ideal. I didn’t want to spend any actual monies, but luckily a local independent repair shop agreed to do a trade. It’s a great little laptop, even if it is a bit on the slow side (PIII-800, 512Mb RAM), and with the dual batteries, touchscreen, and completely solid-state construction (swapping the HD out for a 64G PATA SSD removed the only mechanical part), and titanium body, it promises to be great little machine for everything from HAM radio events to datacenter work, to the occasional bit of programming.

Since I don’t have an internal CD/DVD/floppy drive for it though, I had to get inventive when I installed the new SSD.  I was going to install XP so I could use several pieces of Windows-only configuration applications for my radios, but given how difficult it is to netboot a windows install, I decided to start with Debian. I did a standard netboot from my lan server, as described in the Debian Install Guide, and quite quickly had a working OS.  All the hardware was detected out-of-the-box, although the network card requires firmware (putting a firmware tarball on a USB key and plugging it in during install allows the installer to set it up for you properly (this is also documented in the (excellent) Install Guide))). After starting X for the first time (with fluxbox) I realzied that the touchscreen was not calibrated properly, but luckily there is an easy to use program to fix that.

To get the touchscreen calibrated, simply install xinput_calibrator (and its required libraries, all of which are available in main), and then run xinput_calibrator.  It will print out some lines to add to an X config file.

I’m waiting on some time so I can take the laptop apart, and install a mini-PCI wifi card and antennas, but for now, the PC Card one works fine. Now to figure out how to get my APRS software working!

So I am an Apple Developer for both iOS and OS X, which means I get access to fun things like Lion.  Of course, what better use of a free evening than seeing if it works on a hackintosh? There are plenty of other guides for installing Lion; I’m not going to reiterate what is said on them.  A few things that did make a difference for me though were simply using a cutting-edge version of Chameleon instead of the weird Duet-based EFI emulator hacks, and adding EthernetBuiltIn=Yes to my com.apple.boot.plist file, which makes the app store work.

Of course, it helps that I have a very mac-like system in terms of hardware, and I wouldn’t try unless you know a fair bit about the internals of OS X, but it’s nice to know that it’s already possible to have a fully stable system running.

I’ve been trying to find a good free alternative to cPanel, but so far I’ve been disappointed.  I am so used to having high-quality OSS software that fits my every need, that I am quite surprised at the low level of quality with all the options.

• VHCS
• ispCP ω Omega – a fork of VHCS
• ISPConfig
• Virtualmin – not OSS, but has a free version
• RavenCore

So far, VHCS is a huge pain to use, ispCP doesn’t install properly, ISPConfig is hard to use and not very powerful, Virtualmin doesn’t really fulfil the needs of a hosting control panel, and RavenCore wouldn’t install on either Debian or Ubuntu.  Is it too much to ask that an open-source solution is both reasonably easy to install and half-decent to use?

The XPS Gen 2 is getting pretty old, and it suffers from not having much in common with the MacBook when attempting to instal OSX. With some careful choices and a bit of hard work however, OSX can be made to run reasonably well on it. Below I will document the steps I took to get it running.

1. Purchase a copy of Leopard. Really. If you’re going to use Apple’s software you have to pay for it.
2. Acquire, burn and boot iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Final (same as PPF 5)
3. Open Disk Utility and erase the partition you want to use, making sure to specify “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” as the partition type. Non-journaled may work as well, and is writable from Linux, but YMMV.
4. Read the notes on the License page. They will help keep you out of trouble.
5. Select the Partition onto which you intend to install OSX. Hit continue.
6. Choose Customize, and get ready for the hard part.
7. Make sure “iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Base System” is selected, choose any alternate languages you need, and expand the “iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Intel AMD SSE2 SSE3″ section.
8. Select the following:
   • Kernels-> 9.5.0 Voodoo Kernel
   • Drivers:
     • Chipset Drivers-> Intel ICHx SATA Drivers
     • Chipset Drivers-> LegacyAppleIntelPIIXATA
     • Audio Drivers-> Other Audio Drivers-> AC97 Audio
     • Wireless Drivers->Intel PROSet/Wireless 2200 (if you want. It hardly works and is usually more trouble than it’s worth. Look at Project Camphor for an upcoming real driver.
     • USB Drivers-> Patched USB Drivers (may or may not be necessary. Please let me know if you find one way is better than the other)
     • Power Management-> PowerManagement Package
     • VoodooPower
   • Fixes and Patches-> Dual Boot Time Sync (if you need it)
   • Fixes and Patches-> Seatbelt.kext 10.5.5
   • Fixes and Patches-> PS/2 Device Support-> PS/2 Keyboard Fix
   • Fixes and Patches-> AppleSMBIOS Patch-> Any one SMBIOS patch.
   • Applications-> Whatever apps you want.
9. Install
10. Reboot and pray. I suggest using -v at least the first time you boot, and adding -f couldn’t hurt.
11. Next steps are getting Ethernet and Graphics working. I’ll edit this post when I have time for that.

Moving the iTunes library via the iTunes Preferences pane only moves your MP3s, not downloaded apps, movies, and podcasts, which for some of us means moving the library through iTunes does not actually save much space. Fortunately, there is a very easy procedure to move the entire library cleanly:

1. Close iTunes
2. Move ~/Music/iTunes to a new location
3. Open Terminal
4. cd Music
5. ln -s new/location/for/iTunes iTunes
6. restart iTunes
7. PROFIT!

I’ve been playing with OpenWRT on my new WRT150N recently.  It has been a mixed bag so far.  The router is only supported in Kamikaze, and encryption is not stable in the 7.09 (the latest stable branch).  Luckily, the buildroot-ng system makes handrolling an image dead simple, and trunk seems to work quite well.  Wireless on broadcom devides is still only supported in linux 2.4, but progress is supposedly being made on the new 2.6 drivers, so hopefully soon I will be able to upgrade.

For anyone trying this at home, after checking out trunk (I use git, but svn works fine too), type “make package/symlinks” to add all of the extra packages to the config menu.  Then type “make menuconfig” and choose “Broadcom BCM947xx/953xx [2.4]” as the Target System and “Generic, Broadcom WiFi (MIMO)” as the Target Profile.  After that, just choose any important programs that you want to compile in, and set any you may want later to be built as modules.

Another good trick is to include some basic config files in the image, so that you don’t have to set up your IP, wireless info and password every time.  Simply create a directory called “files” and include your standard /etc/ structure inside.  The files are copied at the very end of the build process, so they override the defaults.  I use this method to give my WRT150N a static LAN IP address, configure wireless, set a root password, and disable DHCP.

The X-WRT web interface is not quite as roubust for Kamikaze as it is for White Russian, but it does the job reasonably well, and looks sleeker than ever.  As usual it has plenty of graphs and controls.