Sunday, October 02, 2005

<creative title>

Been up and running for a while now. I had a minor hiccup when the root partition failed fsck, but I was able to copy the files off to a backup parition, reformat, and copy them back. The failure happened at the same time as I had to manually turm off the computer (because it froze). I'm not sure if the filesystem error was the cause of the crash, or vice-versa. That's the second time it's happened. I'm thinking it might be ReiserFS, but I'm not overly worried. I pulled a backup script off the web and configured it to keep 4 weekly backups and 6 monthly backups at all times (once it builds up to that number, that is). There's a short list of locations you need to back up on a Gentoo system in order to be able to regenerate the exact same system in a straightforward and quick (ignoring compile time) manner.

I started using RAM/swap filesystems for /tmp and /var/tmp, and also for a writable /mnt/inbox folder shared via Samba. The inbox folder is capped at 100MB, while /tmp and /var/tmp are capped at 1GB and 3GB respectively. I have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of swap space. One nice benefit of this is that my compiles happen in /var/tmp, and the downloaded files are stored in RAM, so there's no time lost to reading and writing the hard drive.

The next step in my quest for the ultimate MythTV box is to become an expert (okay, well, maybe a knowledgeable novice) at configuring MySQL. I think that's the last step before I actually dive in to MythTV. We'll see.

In preparation for MythTV, I cleared out my 250GB Hard Drive (I moved the backup data from a partition on this drive to the one I had previousely been using on the 320GB drive for a 32-bit chroot--for which it turns out I don't have much use) and repartitioned it into one huge drive. I might break it up more later. That depends on the demands of Myth's storage scheme(s).

Athena has (has had now for a while) two internet hostnames: athena.homelinux.net, and athena.gentoofreaks.org

The first is updated through DynDns.org, which has limited selection of domains, the second is through afraid.org, which has literally thousands to chose from. RFH's router (a Linksys) can do DynDNS, so I moved that to there, and set up a cron script to update the afraid.org name.

I have Apache set up to route the two paths to different virtual hosts, but right now both of them are pointed at the same place, since I don't have much to put up. I also set it up so that each user can crate a public_html directory in his home folder accessable to the web, which is slightly more convenient than having to go to /var/www/localhost/htdocs/ and doesn't require that I give RFH write access if I want offer him hosting space.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Xorg

It was surprisingly easy.

I'm posting this from Firefox inside Gnome on Athena.

I just had to wait for KDE to finish compiling. I decided to install all of kde (using the kde-meta ebuild that pulls all the components as dependencies) thinking that that was what I had done last time. Well, perhaps it was, but I don't remember it taking 24 hours to compile last time around. Anyway, the reason I had to wait until it was done compiling because I tried starting X using an auto=generated config file and it froze the computer. I tried it with my old one, and it did the same thing. Crashing is not good when you're compiling, because the hard disk is engaged, so I just did other things and installed other software (which is partly why it took that long).

Anway, the easy part was reading the logs from the failed loads, changing the display driver from nvidia (a proprietary driver that I haven't yet installed) to nv (the open source version). I had to make a symlink from /dev/mouse to /dev/input/mice, and I disabled some things that the log had flagged warnings about, logged in as a user, typed 'startx' and, to my amazement, was greeted with the Gnome Desktop environment.

I think just it seemed easy because I knew where to look and what to do this time around.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Dang Script Kiddies

Seriously, who does this kind of thing? I guess it's what I get for publishing a DNS handle to my IP address and forwarding port 22.

Well, no matter. Bring it on, I say. I'll have to start banning IP's. At least then they'll have to write a real script.