Monthly Archives: February 2008

help! CentOS 5.1 + Xen kernel doesn’t see all the RAM in my PC

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Filed under Linux

I’ve run into quite a few odd issues with CentOS 5.1 x64 & the Xen kernel. One of them being the fact that it only sees about 480MB RAM, even though my server has 2GB RAM. So, searching the net, I came across this post: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=250299 which states that grub-0.97-13 has a problem with mapping all the memory with a Xen kernel. The fix? Simple, upgrade to grub-0.97-14, with the following commands: [shell] rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.zouric.com/public/grub-0.97-14.x86_64.rpm [shell] This will install grum 0.97.14. Once done, you need to reinstall grub to the HDD as well, like so: [php] grub-install /dev/sda [/php] PLEASE NOTE: This statement assumes you boot from /dev/sda by default. If you have IDE HDD’s, you need to use /dev/hda

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Howto write an ISO image to a CD-RW from the Linux console

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Filed under HOWTO\'s, SME Server

I need to / want to write ISO’s to CD’s from my Linux server, but since I don’t have an X-Manager like Gnome or KDE running, I need to find a way to write the CD’s from the command line with SSH. Luckely the server is right next to me, and it’s got a CDRW drive. It’s an old 24 speed Samsung CDRW, but that’s fine, it can still do the job well. The only tool I could find that was already installed on my SME 7.3 server (which is based on CentOS 4.6), is cdrecord cdrecord is a command line utility that can write CD’s, erase rewritable (CDRW) cd’s and write DVD’s as well. I’m not going to go into too much about cdrecord, but will outline some basics on how to write a CD from Linux’s commandline. Let’s get started….. First, we need to see where our cdwriter is in the system, with the following command: [shell] cdrecord -scanbus [/shell] This command will scan your PC for CD witers & DVD writers, and tell you on which bus they are. The output could look like this: [/php] scsidev: ‘ATA’ devname: ‘ATA’ scsibus: -2 target: -2 lun: -2 Linux sg driver version: 3.5.27 Using libscg version ’schily-0.8′. cdrecord: Warning: using inofficial libscg transport code version (schily – Red Hat-scsi-linux-sg.c-1.83-RH ‘@(#)scsi-linux-sg.c 1.83 04/05/20 Copyright 1997 J. Schilling’). scsibus0: 0,0,0 0) * 0,1,0 1) ‘SAMSUNG ‘ ‘CD-R/RW SW-224B ‘ ‘R205′ Removable CD-ROM 0,2,0 2) * 0,3,0 3) * 0,4,0 4) * 0,5,0 5) * 0,6,0 6) * 0,7,0 7) * [/php] From this, I can see that my Samsung CD writer is on bus 0, with SCSI id 1 and LUN 0. We’ll need this info later to tell cdrecord which writer to use. If you have more than 1 writer, you’ll need to choose the one with the disk in it. So, to write a CD, I use the following commands: [php] cdrecord -v -dao -speed=24 -eject dev=ATA:0,1,0 centos51.iso [/shell] This will write the file, centos51.iso (for example) to the CD writer at a speed of 24x and then eject it once it’s done. How do I write to a rewritable CD that already has some data on it? Easy. With the blank=fast option :) [php] cdrecord blank=fast -v -dao -speed=24 -eject dev=ATA:0,1,0 centos51.iso [/php] And that’s it. If you need to know more about cdrecord, or want todo more advanced stuff, then you could either visit the cdrecord documents page, or you could just check the help options, with cdrecord -h

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Offline Blog writing & Editing tool

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Filed under Wordpress

I have decided that I need a program that will run on my PC to post / edit my blog, which means I won’t need to login to my blog, http://blog.softdux.com EVERY TIME I want to post something.

So, I google for "Windows blogging tools", and found this cool website, http://www.qumana.com/download_auto_editor_win.htm – from which I downloaded Qumana. Now I can quickly write up a blog entry, and then post it when needed. The beauty about this, is that I can now also write my blog postings offline, and only post them when I want to / when I go online again. Ideal for traveling :)

Powered by Qumana

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Stuff for automating my server installations

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Filed under Hacking Notes

If you’ve ever installed a server, you’ll know how long it can sometimes take, especially if you need to setup software RAID + LVM, and then go through all the packages and deselect what you don’t need. After that you would normally download a few favorite scripts from the net, or do a yum update to tighten the security even more. Well, do this on 10 server, and you know what it’s like. Boring, and time consuming. For me, the country / language / time zone / keyboard layout / etc, doesn’t change. This made me think a bit further, how about an automated Linux installation? I’ve seen this here & there, but never really took it serious. Until now. I need to deploy CentOS based server which will run cPanel, and cPanel mostly installs & managed it’s own software like Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. From the cPanel’s website, I can see that I need a bare minimum installation, and all installations will be the same. And since CentOS is RedHat based, I can use the kickstart file to automate everything.

My goals are as follows:

  • Create a kickstart file, with only the needed packages, and a custom partitioning scheme
  • If possible, setup different software RAID levels on the server, depending on how many HDD’s is installed in the machine
  • Install & configure Xen for vitalization, and possibly setup 1 or 2 dom_U VM’s as well.
  • If I manage to automatically setup a dom_U VM, it would be nice to automatically download & install the latest cPanel scripts as well
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Howto install the Realtek8110C/8169C driver in SME 7.3

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Filed under SME Server

I have a Gigabyte GA-G31MX-S2 and I run SME Server 7.3 on it. The motherboard has an onboard Realtek 8110C Gigabit Ethernet card, which isn’t supported in CentOS 4.6 (or even CentOS 5 for that matter), so I need to manually install a driver to get it to work. Since I have a 2U server case, which only allows me 1 additional PCI card, and I already have a DGE-528T Gigabit Ethernet Adapter, I have no other choice but to install a driver for this card. I don’t want to go and purchase another motherboard, since these are rather cheap, and packed with nice features. Searching the internet, SME Forums, and the CentOS Forums, and found this useful post: Network card Installation help Urgently needed From here I can see that I need to install the following: [php] yum –enablerepo=dag install dkms kernel-devel dkms-r1000 [/php] P.S. I have already enabled the Dag Wieer’s Repository, as can be seen in this post: Howto setup a local yum proxy for your LAN using http-replicator on SME Server 7.0

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Howto setup a local yum proxy for your LAN using http-replicator on SME Server 7.0

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Filed under HOWTO\'s, SME Server

So you want to setup a local proxy to apt & yum updates for your LAN. This will help save you some bandwidth if you have a a few PC’s on the LAN that use yum to install & update any software.

From the homepage, http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/http-replicator/, we can see the following:

HTTP Replicator is a general purpose, replicating HTTP proxy server.

All downloads through the proxy are checked against a private cache, which is an exact copy of the remote file structure. If the requested file is in the cache, replicator sends it out at LAN speeds. If not in the cache, it will simultaneously download the file and stream it to multiple clients.

No matter how many machines request the same file, only one copy comes down the Internet pipe. This is very useful for maintaining a cache of Linux packages.

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How to setup an Out of Office / Vacation reply using Postfix Mailserver & Procmail on Linux

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Filed under HOWTO\'s

Recently, a client of mine needed to setup an “Out of Office”, or also known as “Vacation” reply on his email for when he traveled. Since they don’t use Microsoft Exchange, MS Outlook’s Out of Office feature didn’t work.

The only way to setup an Out of Office reply, is on the mail server itself. Since you’re PC will be off when you’re away, it won’t work on your PC, cause your PC actually needs to download the email before replying with an out of office reply.

So, now we need to setup Procmail on Postfix, on our Linux mail server, to automatically reply to all emails sent to a certain user on the domain, let’ call him Bob. Bob’s email is bob@somedomain.com – so if you were to email bob@somedomain.com while he was out of town, you wouldn’t know it, unless he’s set his out of office reply.
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how to add more features to Wordpress?

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Filed under Blogging

I need to add some more features to my blog, but don’t quite have the time yet todo the research for it.

One thing I REALLY need, is a way to create new posts directly from the frontend, without having to login to the backend everytime. I just don’t know if it’s possible yet, and I don’t have the time on my hands to check it out.

That’s probably why this post will be so short….

Oh, and another thing, before I save this post. I’d love to find a way, to make the “Title” become the “Title” & “Description” in “All in One SEO Pack” as well, so I don’t have to copy & paste the content over every time…..

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finally!!! I got TinyMCE to work in Wordpress

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Filed under Blogging

Man, what a frustration! I couldn’t get TinyMCE to work on my Wordpress installation, doesn’t matter how hard I have tried.

So, I have googled & searched the Wordpress forums, until I finally found something here: Link to article. According to the article, it has something todo with how TinyMCE uses zgip for compression. So, by chaning a line in the code, the problem is solved

Basically, you need to edit the following file: wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_gzip.php and then change the code as follows:
[php]
if ((in_array(‘gzip’, $encodings) || in_array(‘x-gzip’, $encodings) ||
isset($_SERVER['---------------'])) && function_exists(‘ob_gzhandler’) 
&& !ini_get(‘zlib.output_compression’) && ini_get(‘output_handler’) != ‘ob_gzhandler’) {

[/php]

Change the line above to the following:
[php]
if ((in_array(‘gzip’, $encodings) || in_array(‘x-gzip’, $encodings) ||
isset($_SERVER['---------------'])) && function_exists(‘ob_gzhandler’)
&&; !ini_get(‘zlib.output_compression’) &&; get_settings(‘gzipcompression’)) {

[/php]

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