Somewhere out there!

Quick receipe for building sparse filesytems for use with User-Mode Linux.


dd if=/dev/zero of=filesystem.ext2 seek=1024 count=1 bs=4M
/sbin/mkfs -t ext2 filesystem.ext2


This produces for me an empty loopback filesystem which is only 70M in size.

Amongst everything else, I’ve been meaning to investigate openoffice more. Particular integration with databases and simple forms. This seems to me with a bunch of simple templates it would be possible to develop some handy applications.

This guy particularly seems to have a clue. Sometimes I wish it was easier to find things like this out there.

I’ve also got to find some time to improve my cash management spreadsheets with some time series analysis. Probably should look at adding some OOo Statistics and Least Squares Fitting macros.

Also some stuff here. to check out.

Had some trouble getting Dark Horse CRM to work with Tomcat on Debian, I suspect it is because Tomcat is only at version 4 in sid. So I decided to try running it on Gentoo.

I’ve never run Gentoo before, and in fact since 1996 when it comes to Linux pretty much only run Debian. Like most people I started with Slackware, tried Red Hat, fiddled with Stampede and finally found Debian to the be all and end all.

Anyway it wasn’t to hard to get a Gentoo image running on my UML colo server. Simply matter of creating a loop-back filesystem, untaring a stage3 complete copy of gentoo (stage3-i686-2004.1.tar.bz2) then firing it up.

I mostly followed this reference when I was doing the inital upgrade.

At this point in time, debian is still my favourite distribution. I can’t see it changing. Source compiles my be good for desktops, but I think for servers it leaves the possible issue of a easy access compiler. Better not to make things easy for a hacker. Plus the /usr/portage files take up a lot of room. At the moment the smallest I can get gentoo is 1.1G. With debian its down at 150Mb.

Regards its doing the job for me now, Dark Horse CRM deployed without a hitch onto Tomcat5 running on Gentoo. I’ll probably keep it running on this, even if I find a way to get it running on Debian. Its always good to learn new environments.

Its possible I might look at a desktop based on gentoo. I certainly see the benefits of its cut-edge package management for getting the most of your system. I’m not talking about better performance, but an easy way to have the latest packages compiled with the options you want.

I usually forget this exact recipe.


openssl rsa -in privkey.pem -out server.key


I’ve had a copy of Crossover Plugin and then Office floating around since the Codeweavers first started selling their product. When it first came out it did some pretty cool things, and I got it so I could run Excel and Word Viewer on my machine for the times when (sometimes) Gnumeric or (mostly) Abiword couldn’t read a file I need. Unfortunately it couldn’t handle Lotus Smartsuite, the office application we used internally so it didn’t see much use.

Openbsd just gets better day-by-day.

Now it has a builtin pf rulset optimiser.

Well dansguardian is working, and the anti-virus scanner is doing its job.

I’m trying to build a debian package with the Aecio F. Neto’s DansGuardian Anti-Virus patch.
Unfortunately the patch was for 2.7.7-8 and debian is at the current 2.7.7-9.

I should have set this up years ago.

I’m planning to move my router infrastructure to flashboot from flashdist. I’ve got one of my soekris units back from the field, time to do a bios upgrade and some general service before I prepare the dev images for testing.