Inverted Reality

If you administer Linux servers, you might have heard of Webmin. If you haven’t, then you should take a look!

Well today, Jamie Cameron (Webmin developer) e-mailed me a sneak peek of the Webmin mobile device theme which will be released within the next week or so

The add-on is a theme that allows a mobile user to easily administer webmin from anywhere on a device such as an Apple iPhone and is available as an easy RPM update to your existing RPM installed webmin (tar.gz and deb installs also available).

While the interface works fairly well it’s still far from perfect with most of the module and configuration showing as regular full featured web pages and not “fancied up” by iUI (the framework that the rest of the menu system is based on). Jamie says that more work will be done in the future to further improve the UI. I have no doubt that further integration of iUI or even the webapp.net.free.fr framework will offer even faster and lighter access to your Webmin.

Here’s a gallery of screen shots:

Check this out.. Run Fedora 9 (and other LINUX’s) right off a USB stick. Plug it in, boot it up, instant mobile desktop, with the liveusb-creator

“The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives.”

I tried it, it works, it’s super cool. Mind you I tried it on three machines, only one worked. I guess it depends how nicely your PC’s BIOS plays

Tags: fedora, linux, live, usb, liveusb-creator

Today Fedora 8 is available to the public. I’ve been trying to find a mirror to download it however it seems everyone has the same idea and most sites are flooded and timing out. The demand must be huge. I’m pulling it down now via torrent. This could take a while!

I’ll have more information soon. I hope to install it tonight and take a look at whats new or changed. Looks to be some nice improvements!

I use transmission to download files sometimes, it’s a torrent client. http://transmission.m0k.org

It has a neat feature where you can set how much bandwidth the client has during certain hours, like an on peak and off peak.

My off-peak quota is 15Gig, not much I know, and isn’t nearly used enough. So I figured why not set Transmission to start downloading at 2am when my off-peak quota starts?

I added the Transmission app to the crontab to start up at 2am:

open terminal, type “crontab -e” this will open vi. Hit “i” to start inserting text and put in:

0 2 * * * /Applications/Transmission.app/Contents/MacOS/Transmission &

then hit “esc” then “:wq” to write and quit. The “2″ in the above line represents 2am. Dont forget to remove the entry when you do not want transmission to start at 2am! you can do this by opening the file as per the above, but instead of “i” inserting text, just hit “dd” to delete the line, then “:wq” to save and exit.

you could probably do this with just about any app (schedule them to open/run as you desire)

for more information, do a search for “cron”!

Have you ever wondered if there was an appl available, that was free, that would take care of your Invoices?

Well, have I got something for you?!

http://www.simpleinvoices.org/

Simple Invoices is a web-based mySQL/PHP driven application that allows the user to create, edit, manage electronic invoices. Some features include export to PDF/XLS/DOC, reporting on billers, customers, product sales… and more!

I’ve been using Simple Invoices for some time now, and have started getting more involved in the project.

It’s rather ’simple’ to install, and easy to use. I highly recommend it!

from the transmission site
0.70 Released!
Posted by John Clay on 18/04/07
After almost a year without an update, we are pleased to release version 0.70 of Transmission.

Note: From 0.70 on, Transmission for Mac OS X requires 10.4 Tiger or newer.

0.70 (2007/04/18)
New icon
Automatic port mapping (NAT-PMP and UPnP IGD)
Peer exchange (PEX) compatible with Azureus and uTorrent
Multitracker support
Better handling of tracker announce interval
Fixes bug where absurdly huge upload/download totals could be sent
Automatic tracker scraping
Cache connected peers
Many miscellaneous bugfixes and small improvements

Today I’ve migrated this web site to a dedicated web server that I’ve setup in the USA with Superb Hosting.

It’s expensive to have the server, but hopefully I will have some web clients that will help ease the monthly costs! The server is just an Intel consumer box running Linux (Fedora Core 6)

The speed improvement should be excellent. As previously this site was run off a server, at home, on the end of my 1500/256k ADSL link. (nasty)

I’m looking forward to further enhancing the machine for even more services soon!

Last night I setup a backup scheme for a client, they have two Linux machines, a mail server and an intranet server, with no real backup….

I setup a little ‘rsync’ script, that uses SSH to copy data from one machine to the other. It’s all setup on the one server, it copies data off the remote machine, and also copies data to it.

The connection is encrypted and keys were generated for it all to happen automatically. excellent!

A cron job runs the script(s) as desired in the wee hours of the morning.

I sorta followed this guide, it’s excellent, and easy: http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html

Oh! and you can setup something like this for your Mac too (OS X has rsync built in, so cool). I’ll be setting up an automator workflow soon which will use rsync to backup data to an external hard disk, for another client. More info on this later

Another weekend bites the dust. What a shame weekends just aren’t long enough!

I spent saturday upgrading some Linux servers for a client. It went well. Two machines. From Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 6. The only snag was that one of the servers (intranet server) refused to run the php intranet app after the upgrade. Bogus. ezPublish requires PHP4, Fedora Core 6 is packaged with PHP5. ezPublish refused to work. Two options left, downgrade (reverse) the machine, or remove PHP5 and hack PHP4 onto the box. I think I’ll downgrade it, it’s way easier. Glad I made a backup of the databases before I took the plunge *sigh*

I’m heading back on-site this evening to rectify the situation. *grumble*

Sunday was a bit of a relaxing day. I headed down to Ryper Hobbies to race the XRAY T2 (tourning car) it’s been a while, a long while. I was recently showered with gifts from a sponsor so I figured why not go try the gear out at the track.

I got some of those ‘RP’ tyres made by Take Off. Chen says “mate they are pure race tyres, they wont last long”. He was right, after race 4, they were down to the canvas, I wasn’t happy! *grrrr*

I also played with some new ‘MUCH MORE’ gear. Including the power distribution block, battery heatsink II, car stand, and a few other things. Pretty neat gear. Lets hope the fan’s inside the new heatsink keep working. MUCH MORE fan’s are known to fail easily.

The T2 handled like turd on a stick. The track was a bit slippery due to the dirt all over it, no setup changes I made could make this thing handle nicely. Oh well, soldier on! I managed to TQ and win, although probably due to the other guys having the same kind of problems as me (handling, breakages, etc)

I tried my new Novak 4.5R brushless motor, it’s super fast, too fast, infact it’s silly for the Ryper track, I don’t know why some of the other guys use it there, the 5.5 is plenty. Maybe I’m just a wuss! heh

Tuesday night I might head to PRECC (carpet) and run the 1/12th. it’s fun and fast.

Since changing over my home server last night, I’ve had to re-configure spam filtering.

A quick run down:

sendmail, procmail, spamassassin.

added this to /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `list.dsbl.org')dnl
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `bl.spamcop.net')dnl
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `sbl.spamhaus.org')dnl
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `blackholes.mail-abuse.org')dnl
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `relays.mail-abuse.org')dnl

my /etc/procmailrc:
DROPPRIVS=yes
:0 fw
* < 256000
| /usr/bin/spamc -f

my per user /home/user/.procmailrc files:
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail

:0 H
* ^X-Spam-Status:.*Yes
{
EXITCODE=67
:0:
spam
}

Explanation. I’ll keep it short. we’re blacklisting regular spamers using a few servers listed in sendmail.mc so we wont even process emails that come and are in those DB’s. Then we are sending all other emails that are under 256K through spamassassin. If there is spam found, we’re throwing it back at the spammer. Spam is dropped and wont reach the user mailbox.

See how things go. May need to make changes, but so far so good!