OwlManAtt’s Blog

I’ve got quite a few projects to work on. And I’m now going to share what’s on the owlmanattian TODO list. Each item is seen as a seperate project.

• Install Ubuntu on the new old iBook (liz).
• Set up Ubuntu on the new old iBook (liz).
• Get OpenBSD 3.7, install OpenBSD 3.7 on almus.
• Set up SMTP server, clamav, and spamassasin on almus.
• Set up POP3 or IMAP (haven’t decided) on almus.
• Maybe set up Hoarde on almus for webmail? (need apache, php)
• Finish Evanion-base:

• Private messages
• Avatars
• Admin (user stuff, forum stuff, news stuff, tracking/data relation display)
• News

As some of you may know, today is the third Sunday of the month. And you know what that means: SCOSUG.

But, this time around, there’s a twist. Instead of the normal meeting-food-home thing, Steve IM’d me about the Sun UltraSparc 1s he’s been meaning to give me. He said he’d drop them off and give me a ride to the meeting, then went on cleaning. He dug up a lot more stuff, and he said he’d give that to me, too.

That itself is awesome. I haven’t completed inventorying yet, but it’s excellent stuff. A 21″ CRT monitor (it makes the 17″ that it’s dualscreened with look punny), the two UltraSparc 1s, a Commodore 128 + stuff for it and the books/software, a box of LinuxJournal issues going back a LONG ways, an Iomega tapedriver and some 2gb tapes, and that cat barcode scan thing.

Getting the monitor hooked up was an interesting task. It was sitting face-down on my bed, three feet from the desk. I began the process by moving the 15″ monitor that went to bell off the desk, then moving the 17″ to where the 15″ stood. I unpluged it and put it onto the second port on the video card. Then I googled the 21″ model number to get the frequencies and fixed the Xorg config.

Finally, the task of moving the monitor to the desk came. It was a tricky process. The monitor weighs a feathing ton, and it would be difficult to move it three feet. So, I turned it over, then me and my dad shoved it down onto my rolling chair. We rolled it three feet to the desk, and hefted it up onto the edge, then pushed.

With the monitor in place, I plugged shit in, and I punched the on buttons. One /etc/init.d/gdm start later, I had it perfect. One 21″ and one 17″ at 1024×768 running together. Pwnage.

Next came the Suns. I took a look at them, and put them into the printer stand. The monitor and keyboard were both special Sun Microsystems things which I don’t have. I’m going to need to go to radio shack to get a null modem cable so I can use minicom instead of a monitor.

I haven’t touched the C128 yet, or the magazines. I’m too tired.

Now, you think I got all of this stuff and then went to SCOSUG, right? Wrong!

Steve works for the Yale Med School’s IT department. So, before the meeting, he gave me a tour of the server room and his office. The server room was impressive.

When you walk in, you get blasted back by the powerful jet engine sound of a bazillion servers running. There must have been like 15-20 TB of storage in that room. He showed me all of the servers and told me what they did. There were also several cages with just harddrives in them. Lots and lots and lots of drives.

Then there was the tape robot. This thing was as big as a fucking hallway. I mean, WOW. Roughly 7TB of tape in there. It. Was. Massive.

Then I saw the firewall thing. It was cool, because he telnetted into the actual firewall box and it had a nice shell. He showed me some of the rules and how it worked.

Then we went to the office. There were three cubicles he showed me, one the testing lab, one his, and one storage. The testing lab was a mess of cables and boxen. His cubicle was a bit neater. He had two desktops, and then a sort of wireless gateway thing he was working on (it was to force people to register their machines if they hadn’t already done so).

A lot of cool stuff. At SCOSUG, we had a discussion on the future of the group instead of a normal presenation (not many people showed, but damnit, this is something that had to be done!). It looks like a website overhaul is pretty definite, and the meeting format was discussed.

But yea. Sleep now.

As promised, I’m here again. I have a review for you, but it isn’t the AO review. I think I’ll do that later in the week.

As you may be able to tell from the title, I’m once again working with Ubuntu. This time, instead of just installing it on a seperate drive and running it once, I’ve nuked Debian and put Ubuntu on as Bell’s operating system. See, after Mako’s presentation, I couldn’t resist. It just seemed to awesome to refuse.

And it *is* too awesome to refuse. The installation, which is built off of Debian’s new installer (but has been hacked to ask as few questions as humanly possible and autodetect more things), was painless. The most complex task was partitioning, but that was only because I chose to do it by hand. See, I wanted to keep my /home partition as it was, so I couldn’t go with one of the quick Ubuntu-does-it partition options. However, Ubuntu could have done it for me if I told it to.

Once Ubuntu was installed, it rebooted, installed a few final packages and updated, then went right into the login screen.

And oh boy, was that a login screen. It was pleasing to the eye and to the ear. It’s much more elegant looking that Debian’s default gdm setup.

I slapped down my login credentials, and away I went into gnome. It adapted to the majority of my old gnome settings, with the exception of the mail-notification applet. This wasn’t in the Ubuntu-supported section of the repo, so I just had to add universe and apt-get it.

Ubuntu came with a decent array of desktop applications. It sported Firefox, totem, evolution, OpenOffice, and the rest of the apps needed for a functional desktop. I installed Thunderbird, since I prefer that to the outlook clone, struggled a bit with the older mail/settings files in the newer version of Thunderbird, and got it all working. (The difficulty with moving profiles between different thunderbird installs isn’t Ubuntu-specific. I have trouble doing it everywhere, Netscape Mail for WIndows included. Gah.)

MP3/Flash/DeCSS support was only one more apt-get away. The process for getting these patent-encumbered technologies setup was MUCH less painful than what one would have to do under Debian.

Next came SSHD. One apt-get and I’m good.

There was still one minor problem, though. You see, Ubuntu uses sudo for everything that needs root. The root account itself is locked by default. So, a lot of the administrative GUIs request my password when they start. The problem is that sudo caches my password for 15 minutes, and there isn’t any obvious button to clear it.

I do not want anyone to be able to walk up 15 minutes after I enter my password and fuck around with synaptic. Really, that’s not good. The fix, however, was easy. I found it in the sudoers manpage. A simple timestamp_timeout=0 in the /etc/sudoers file took care of everything.

There are a lot of improvements over Debian. When apt is running, or when there are updates avalible, an icon appears in the notification area. The mail notification applet only displays when there’s new mail. The dictionary applet shows spelling corrections beside the defenition instead of popping up a new window. Small things like that.

The killer feature, however, is hotplug. Debian probably had it in the repos, but it would be a bitch to set up. Ubuntu has it deployed by default. And oh boy, is this nice.

Now, I do not need to mount anything. Whenever I plug in my DAP or my thumbdrive, it mounts it and displays the filesyetem. When I plug my camera in, it SEES it as a camera and offers to move the images over onto the drive. That’s a big improvement over Debian not even noticing my camera.

Oh, and the same goes for CDs/DVDs. I pop one in, and it mounts it. Boom.

So far, I haven’t come across many shortcomings. The administrative GUIs are far superior to Debian’s, and I still have access to every package in Debian.

So, Ubuntu’s rating: most excellent. Highly suggested for starting out, even better than Fedora. The only thing Fedora has over it is a a proper GUI for the installer. Ubuntu is curses-based, Fedora is a full-blown X interface. But I’m sure something is coming soon!

And on to other business. I’d just like to end this post on a tastey note.

Mm, yes, pizza. I made it from scratch. Next time, I’ll take pictures of each step so I can write the Pizza-Making HOWTO.

Greetings once again, loyal readers. I know you have all been checking for updates every day, and you’ve been becoming increasingly worried about me dropping dead.

Well, you have nothing to fear, I’m still breathing. I haven’t been too busy these past few weeks, but since I haven’t updated in awhile, I’ll tell you all about it.

One of the few things that I’ve been doing is related to World of Warcraft. Owl playing that stupid shit game? No no, not exactly. You see, there is another game called Anarchy Online. It’s an older MMORPG, and at one time, it was fairly popular.

Then WoW came along, and half of the AO userbase defected. In responce, Funcom’s marketing department crapped out a year-long trial period in an attempt to find some new users.

And that is what I’ve been up to. I’ll be doing a review sooner or later (not now, it’s one in the morning). So yea. Level 61 soldier. Woo.

I’ve also been listening to some podcasts on my brand-new SanDisk Digital Audio Player. So far, I’ve listened to the LQ podcast, Kevin Devin’s In The Trenches, and the Linux Link Tech Show.

The LQ podcast isn’t all that spectacular. All you really get out of it is the opensource news, which I get on Slashdot anyway. There were a series of interviews that were pretty good, but that’s about it.

ITT was pretty good. It’s mainly a sysadmin thing, some I’ve gotten some good tips, and heard a few good stories.

The Linux Link Tech Show has so far been the best. These ‘casts are *long*. 80-130 minutes each. It’s four people who run Linux screaming and bitching about whatever (usually related to Windows or how they fucked the webcast up). It’s pretty much the conversations that we have after the presentation at SCOSUG, except more drawn-out. It’s pretty amusing.

Yea. Expect more from me soon (read as: I’ll post again in a month or so. Go to hell.).

It’s now March (four months remaning until summer break), so everything has been pushed into the archive. As usual.

Not much going on as of late. I did the remote gentoo install, but I think I already posted on that. Uberuser’s xdm broke, and it took a few days to fix, but now everything is running perfectly, with the exception of cedega, but that’s his fault. He got a package for RH/FC, so it doesn’t work properly.

Mhm.