I’ve had a spare data cruncher (Dell Precision 479 Xeon 2.8) sitting under my desk for awhile. Not being terribly interested in OpenBSD that it came to me with (sorry Eric), I blew it away and installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron x86_64. It seems quite stable and is perhaps quicker than 7.10. That isn’t my point, though.

This weekend I installed the 32 bit version on a Dell Inspiron and it seemed to due the laptop good. Resume from sleep is definitely faster. Today I thought I’d take a real leap and upgrade in-place my 64 bit Thinkpad T60. I didn’t want to have to fool around with configuring LVM and associated encryption so I thought I’d just sudo update-manager -c -d to upgrade to the Hardy Heron Beta.  I’m happy to report that everything seems to work fine.  I was a little nervous on first reboot while waiting for a sign that dm-crypt was working.  After entering my dm-crypt password I noticed that there was a ext3 drive check in progress.  It was subtle compared to the same process in Gutsy since it didn’t drop out of the gui to do it.

Everything seems to work fine.  Audio, DVD, VPN, all work fine.  Sleep and resume seem considerably faster though on first resume my wireless card wasn’t found.  Hope that gets fixed.  Also, I’m happy that wake-on-lan works on all of the machines I’ve tested so far, which wasn’t the case in Gutsy.  Several machines would wake in Windows, but not in Linux, which was a bummer.  I don’t consider myself lazy, but wake-on-lan is awesome.  I hope that it works with dd-wrt so I can wake my home desktop remotely.

So, be it here known that it is possible to in-place upgrade an LVM/dm-crypt encrypted machine from 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon to 8.04 Hardy Heron.

I’ve been having some trouble lately with RoadRunner from Time Warner Cable.  Their DNS servers are ridiculously slow and I decided to take some action and switch to OpenDNS.  Details follow.

First, I configured my Buffalo router running DD-WRT to use OpenDNS and to update DynDNS of my dynamic IP address.  Then I  configured  dnsomatic to update OpenDNS  so that my custom network settings will follow my home network as the address changes.  Actually, my dynamic address at home hasn’t changed more than a couple of times in more than a year, but it’s nice to have a static domain name to use when connecting to my network from elsewhere.

I think my tubes are considerably faster and I’m not getting the flaky name resolution failures that I’ve been getting recently.  Plus, when I don’t have to support TWC in their ignorant and greedy bid to redirect DNS requests from nonexistent domains to their advertisements.

We’ve been playing around with budgeting and tracking spending.  I actually have a box of receipts on my desk from the last month or so that I had planned to go through and categorize in Google Docs or an Open Office spreadsheet.  It’s daunting looking at this big box of random slips of paper.  I have no idea how people track spending.  I carried a check register in my wallet for awhile and tried to record each transaction as it occurred.   Not very successful.

Now I’m trying GnuCash.  Brandi had some experience with Microsoft Money and it seemed ridiculously overcomplicated for our needs.  I also don’t use Windows so it wasn’t really an option and GnuCash is free.  I downloaded transaction from American Express and imported them easily, but my credit union, North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union, only offers CSV downloads.  GnuCash doesn’t recognize CSV.  So, I wrote a python parser to convert the CSV file to QIF, which GnuCash does understand.  Here’s a link to secu2qif.

We’ll see if we get anywhere.  While I was parsing I did notice that both the state and federal revenue services have issued  us refunds, which was a nice surprise.  They were both quite quick, I think.   Boy, that mortgage interest deduction was a nice benefit.

I thought I’d upload the presentation from our Hackfest project in spite of the fact that the code isn’t ready.  The idea was to create a simple GUI interface to create library Facebook apps.  It’s based on the work done at Ryerson University Library.  I started the day working on the open source Evergreen ILS, but I thought I’d be more useful to the other group.  Fun stuff.  I’ll post the application if we finish it.

I’m on my way to Access 2007  in Victoria, BC.  The library is very generous with travel funds, but doesn’t pay for internet access by the rank and file.  Now that many hotels charge around $20 USD per day for wireless, I’ve had to work around the obstacles.  I discovered Ping Tunnel not long ago and this is my first opportunity to test it.  It’s pretty easy to configure except for IPTables firewall rules to allow ICMP traffic without allowing other junk.  Anyway, by using SSH to create an encrypted tunnel to the server I can use any application over the ICMP tunnel at pretty respectable speed.  SSH -D 8080 localhost -p 7777 creates a SOCKS 5 proxy connection that I can use to route traffic through.  Very nice!

I installed the beta release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to test application compatibility with 64 bit Linux. Specifically, I wanted to verify that the Oracle Calendar desktop client, Crossover Office, Internet Explorer 6, and Microsoft Office 2003 work without errors. I haven’t ever opted for the 64 bit version before and was worried about not being able to run applications that I commonly use at work. I feared for nothing! Everything went very smoothly.

In fact, installation and configuration was a breeze. Nvidia driver and proprietary codec installation was incredibly easy even though I decided to use a 32 bit browser so that I can easily use plugins such as Sun Java, Adobe Acrobat, Real Player, and Flash. In a former job I installed hundreds of systems with Windows version ranging from 95 to XP. Installing and configuring Linux AND all the software I use is orders of magnitude faster and easier. I hadn’t ever just copied over configuration directories before, but by copying the directories for Thunderbird, Firefox, ssh, gnupg, and Pidgin, I probably saved myself at least an hour. I had a nearly exact replica of my old system in about 2 hours. In fact, for applications like Oracle Calendar, I didn’t even install them in the new 64 bit system. I just copied the entire directory from the old system to the new and it ran.

I can’t say that I notice any speed improvement from migrating to the 64 bit environment, but I probably wouldn’t notice. I mean, fast is fast enough. I was able to play Call of Duty and Battlefield 2 under Cedega so I can’t complain. Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon will be officially released October 18th.

I’ve been toying with the idea of populating my domain and hosting at home. Since I sold my Cobalt Qube I have one machine at home on which to host. It strikes me as a bad idea to host a development site on the system that is also the archive for all of my digital artifacts such as photos, college papers, and correspondence. Of course, I maintain a mostly up-to-date, off-site backup (who doesn’t?), but that doesn’t fully mitigate the inconvenience and possibly disastrous consequences (think keylogger) that might result from an exploited workstation. So, what to do? I could pay someone else for hosting. The pro’s are that it’s relatively inexpensive, there is some expectation of maintained up-time, and my data is not at-risk.

I’ve experimented with virtual machines including Kernel-based Virtual Machine for Linux and VMware Server.  The expectation with a virtual machine is that an exploit in Apache2 would be confined to the virtual server and would not allow access to external file space.  However, virtualization introduces more overhead and, due to increased complexity, increases the likelihood of failure.  That said, no one is paying me to maintain a certain amount of up-time.  I’ve also been thinking of implementing mod_chroot and mod_security, both of which are included in the Ubuntu software repositories.  I have no experience with either, but they seem to be a nice compromise between virtualization and running straight Apache.

The problem I foresee with  running Apache chroot is the difficulty running third-party software in conjunction with Apache.  I’ve been playing with django, dojo, and would like to explore some map applications like Minnesota Map Server.  I also want to work more with Python CGI.  That may make virtualization a simpler environment to configure than chroot.  I’m open to advice.

is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Well, at least it seems to be the favorite number of the Motion Picture Association of America. They’re issuing DMCA Takedown Notices to people who post this number, I’ve read. I’ve always wanted one of my own! For those readers not ‘in the know’, this number is the decryption key for HD-DVD Processing. DVD encryption is meant to prevent DVD copying, but also makes it a criminal act to watch DVD’s in Linux, among other things. When I pay for a DVD I want to be able to watch it. That’s it. Also, copyright law clearly grants the right to make ‘archival backups’. See Spread this number for more information.