Adobe AIR on amd64 or ia64 Ubuntu/Kubuntu
Adobe does not yet have a 64 bit version of the AIR SDK or runtime for Linux. They do have some instructions for getting it to work. If you run Ubuntu, it is much simpler. just type:
$ sudo aptitude install ia32-libs lib32asound2 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32z1 libc6 libc6-i386
I have only tested this on Jaunty, so I can’t promise it works on earlier releases, but it’s lots easier than the manual unpacking stuff on Adobe’s page.
Zenoss Plugins now support OpenBSD
Zenoss is a great open source system monitoring tool. I usually configure it to get data using SNMP. However, I have a few remote OpenBSD boxes that I want to keep an eye on, and I am not going to expose SNMP to the universe. Zenoss has a cool thing called Zenoss Plugins which let your collector SSH into a machine and get basic statistics. The current version of Zenoss Plugins (2.0.4) does not have support for OpenBSD.
Here’s how you add it:
Installing Bespin on Kubuntu 8.10
I have I have had Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) on one of my machines for a month or so. I really miss baghira, which makes linux look at much like OSX as linux can look. Alas, there will be no baghira for QT4. I thought I’d try out cloudcity (or bespin, I can’t figure out what the real name is), written by the same guy who wrote baghira. It’s not an OSX clone (boo), it’s still early code, and you’ll have to compile your own, but it’s not hard. Here’s what I did:
jactiveresource launched
ActiveResource is one of the cooler parts of Ruby on Rails. It uses the dynamic goodness of ruby to consume RESTful resources without having to hardly write any code. How about this for a stupid-easy class:
class Person < ActiveResource::Base site = http://api.example.com end
Three lines of code makes a proxy class for a remote service, ActiveResource dynamically figures everything else out.
I needed some Java code that could consume RESTful resources in a Rails application. I looked around to see if I could find any code that would do this for me. I found Restlet, which looks like a pretty good server side framework for writing and publishing restful services, but I need the client side of that. So I decided to start a new project called jactiveresource, which is a port of ActiveResource to java. Because java is statically typed it won't be quite as easy as it is in ruby, but I think we can get close. This weekend I stood up a site to host it, and got the first bits of code working. Stay tuned....
The perfect template engine
There are a ton of template engines out there, for every different language and platform you can imagine. Some people claim PHP is just a fancy template engine. Others say printf is the first and only real template engine. There are many tools out there that meet various niches and requirements in this fairly broad space. Many templating engines are only available for one or two programming languages/platforms. Without debating the merits of the platforms, here are the criteria for the perfect template engine.
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on an ThinkPad X61 Tablet
This weekend I installed Gutsy, now officially known as Kubuntu 7.10 on my X61. I decided I’d try and write up a guide on thinkwiki.org. Because I don’t have an optical drive for my laptop, installation was a bit tricky, I ended up booting off the network. Once over that hurdle, everything else pretty much just worked. No fussing with X configuration settings, wired and wireless network just worked, sound worked etc. Installing Linux has come a long way in the last few years.
DHCP Failover on OpenBSD
I have been running a DHCP server on my home network for eons now, and today I decided I’d move it on to my OpenBSD firewall cluster. It probably really shouldn’t be there but I already run a handful of other internal services there, like DNS, and NTP. Running DHCP on the firewall cluster also means that I can upgrade any machine on my network without losing internet access. Here’s how I got it set up and working.
Running xntpd on my OpenBSD firewall cluster
Now that my firewall cluster is working better, I can add some additional critical services to it. For a long time I have run a time server on a machine on my network so we can have consistant accurate time. I thought I would move this over to my firewall cluster, giving me redundant time servers. The setup was pretty easy.
First, get the xntpd package for OpenBSD from your favorite mirror. OpenNTPD is fine, but the lack of the ntpq command is enough for me to not use it. Once you have xntpd installed, we need to get it set up so it will run when you boot.
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OpenBSD Firewall Cluster
I have been running an OpenBSD firewall cluster on my home network for some time. These two machines use CARP and pfsync to seamlessly fail over interfaces in case of a hardware or software failure. This has been quite convenient, and allows me to upgrade OpenBSD without losing internet connectivity. I only have one available public IP address, so that has to be on the CARP interface, ie each firewall can’t have it’s own public IP address. This meant that the backup machine had no connectivity to the outside world.
Uptime
# uptime 7:02pm up 443 days 3:47, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 0.16, 0.50
Finally I had to reboot to do an OS upgrade. This was a SLES 9 box, 2GB ram, 2 dual core Xeons, 5 72GB SCSI disks. It has 25 users logged on every day, network boots 6 diskless workstations, mail, DNS, samba, and misc other stuff. No leaking memory, no borked filesystems; it just ran.