Somewhere out there!

The 3.5 version of the IFolder Server has just been released as open source. Yah!

I’ve been wanted to running this for a while as it seems like a well tested system that works well with offline files and is cross-platform. There are even build instruction for Dapper, plus config details. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to test this some time in the next month or so.

Update: Notes on builder IFolder Server on X68_64. Unfortunately it looks a little tricky. Seems I’ll have to figure running a 32bit userland on a 64bit xen kernel. I think they might be some problems with 64bit modules and 32bit modutils, have to check in the mailing list.  Also see this review with some good comments.

Technorati Tags: ifolder, oss

Here is a xargs shell tip for moving several subversion controlled files.

find . -name \*.html  | xargs -n1 -I '{}'  svn mv  {}  ../archive/

Technorati Tags: subversion, shell

Star Control II was one of the best games ever, now its been released as open source and remaster: The Ur-Quan Masters.

Some useful notes about VMware Server versus VMware Workstation

If, like me, you run VMware on a laptop, you face the issue of what happens to your VMware sessions when the host’s battery runs out of power, and the host wants to shut down. Neither Workstation nor Server does a perfect job of shutting down the guest sessions cleanly before the host shuts down, not in my experience, but Server definitely does a better job.

and from part 4

The actual limitation is that it doesn’t support sound when your client console is connected to a remote machine running VMware Server. The sound appeared to be disabled in my guest sessions on my laptop initially (i.e. the sound icon had a ‘disabled’ icon superimposed on it), which confused me. I’m not sure what changed, to be honest, but the sound is fine now, and it does indeed work for the client sessions on my laptop.

This guy has a good review.

At the moment I also trying out Parallels which is the only system to use the Core Duo VT features. Unfortunately Parallels doesn’t seem to be able to import the VMware disk images I’ve been using.

Technorati Tags: vmware, parallels, vt, virtualisation

Following on from the previous receipe: Bash, looping over stdin, here is a better method:

sudo pdbedit -L | cut -f1 -d: | grep -v nic | xargs -n1  sudo pdbedit -x<a href="/2005/06/24/bash-looping-over-stdin/">

Remove all entries except for “nic”.

Technorati Tags: samba, tip

From Cringely’s A Whole New Ball Game:

Last week, a Microsoft data security guru suggested at a conference that corporate and government users would be wise to come up with automated processes to wipe clean hard drives and reinstall operating systems and applications periodically as a way to deal with malware infestations. What Microsoft is talking about is a utility from SysInternals, a company that makes simply awesome tools.The crying shame of this whole story is that Microsoft has given up on Windows security. They have no internal expertise to solve this problem among their 60,000-plus employees, and they apparently have no interest in looking outside for help. I know any number of experts who could give Microsoft some very good guidance on what is needed to fix and secure Windows. There are very good developers Microsoft could call upon to help them. But no, their answer is to rebuild your system every few days and start over. Will Vista be any better?

Crazy.

I’m downloading the update now, it comes in at a massive 332Mb. It’s coming down at a reasonable rate, so we’ll see how it goes once its here. From: hx4700 Windows Mobile 5.0 Upgrade @ Mobility Today.

As a sidenote, I’ve been thinking recently of replacing the hx4700 with a UMPC. I’ve been using a Treo 650 which is a much better PDA than the hx4700. A good UMPC would be light enough to still provide me with the primary function I now use the hx4700 for, which is reading ebooks. Plus it could add some functionality in combination with a large Tablet. The Tablet being a workspace and the UMPC provide a notepad. We’ll see things go once I finally have a tablet and have been using it for a while.

Technorati Tags: hx4700, wm5.0, pocketpc

I turned off Markdown as it was getting annoying, with the WYSIWYG editor in WP2.0 Markdown isn’t really useful anyway more. I also installed Code Snippets so I could present things a bit better in the article about Lighttpd and Daemontools.

I must say Code Snippets is very easy to install and use.

Anyway, some comments and a few articles will probably be broken without Markdown. I’ll fix them as I find them.

Next thing on the to do list is an upgrade to the theme on this site, and then add something useful like About.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, plugin, code

These guys have an interesting looking project called Enomalism Virtualized Management Console which is an open source web based Xen domain management console. After looking at the screen shots, I’m looking forward to seeing how it functions. They have some futher work which seems to leverage this to provide an integrated collaborative content management for business called TYfresco. Combining Zimbra, Sugarcrm and, a new project for me, Alfresco.

I tried to get Zimbra running recently on an Amd64 Debian domU, but ran into 64bit issues. After several attempts at compiling Zimbra, I figure my next try will be with a 32bit chroot.

Anyway I’ve also been thinking along these lines and better Xen management recently. I’ve been considering building my own system based on Cfengine and Layed Subversion. Cfengine is meant to be very powerful, and is some thing I’d like to spend time learning regardless. Laysvn seems easier to use now, however I’m in two minds about its functionality. The balance been easy of use and security is something I have to explore further.

I see a tool like this as being useful for both deploying new and migrating old servers, plus the restoration management in the event of a system failure. However this needs to be balanced against the leakage of system security information from files like /etc/shadow. On one hand it’s important to store this, on the other with a bad implementation it increases the risk that secure information will leaked. Another thing to consider, as indicated by several comments on Tracking, auditing and managing your server configuration with Subversion in 10 minutes, is permissions management.
Finally I saw this cool looking admin tool on freshmeat in my rss reader Great News today. Network wide updates for systems which use APT, or nwu. Maybe this is something I figured I could do with cfengine, or maybe it’s something that can be combined with cfengine. However, very useful work.

As more systems are run on Xen, making it much easier for sysadmins to partition their services on the same hardware and therefore make system maintenance easier on the application. Better tools will have to be produce to assist management on the OS level.

Technorati Tags: xen, etc, management, cfengine, laysvn

From Thick clients: Betting against the network?, an article from Computerworld: Sun CIO juggles tight budgets, IT integration. This comment particularly was interesting:

(Bill) Vass (of Sun) expects to spend about $300 million this year on Sun’s IT needs, a figure that represents about 2% of the company’s expected revenue this year. The average company spends between 3% and 4% of its revenue, most figures show — and most of Sun’s direct competitors spend far more.

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