Oh no you didn't! Why no Gigabit?

I ordered a 100ft Cat5e cable. Plugged everything in, blinking lights on the Trendnet gigabit switch and boom 100Mbit light goes on not the more desirable 1000Mbit light. Groan!

I noticed my cable was exceptionally light and flexible. The $2.75 + shipping is just too good to be true especially when the next best price is $19.99.

Is this a new wrinkle to ebay selling: selling goods that aren't quite standard (e.g. Cat 5e) for way less, it will work for most people and just refund the rest.

Ugh.

iPad or econobox PC value equation for K-5

I like how lowendmac.com does a mac abc 2010 value equation story so in that vein.

Low-end PC from major vendor education site:

• 512 MB RAM
• Vista
• 120 GB Hard drive
• $379
  

When we configure the machine into a usable form that might last 4 - 6 years:

• 2GB RAM
• Windows 7 HP 64-bit
  
• 120 GB Hard drive
• $588

What else this PC might need:

• Windows 7 maintenance
• Software lic. cost install & maintenance
• 400W power supply
• Giant footprint in crowded classroom
  
• LCD monitor purchase/replacement $129.00
  
• 1/120 slice of 20 hour/week IT support**
  

Lets look at the lowest end iPad:

• 16GB
• WiFi
• $499

and for the iPad

• AppStore
• 2W??
• built in screen
• touch interface
• 1.1 lbs
  
• Self serve
• iTunes gift cards

Help Windows 7HP cold shoulders my HP 5P LaserJet printer

Why can't they just get along? My new Windows 7HP 64-bit cold shoulders my HP 5P LaserJet PCL5 printer!

Solution:
Bonjour Print Service for Windows
Installed the package, it saw the printer on the network, printed a test page and I was done.

Long winded back story:
OK so it is a 12 year old printer running on its original cartridge -- its still a workhorse. I have it on a print server and I thought it would be a cinch. HP's Universal Printer Driver looked very promising since it saw the printer on the network. But then it dies:

64-bit Win7HP finds the network printer P1_HP and then windows explorer crashes (WER dump). 5.2.0.8874 splwow64, printer driver host for 32 bit apps frozen in resource monitor

The included W7HP driver didn't work either.

Hudson or Electric Cloud for continuous integration

Talk this:

Slow Complex Builds & Hudson vs. Electric Cloud

ElectricCommander

maven or ivy?

Apache Ivy™ / Apache Maven™ Comparison

Visiting NixOS land

Hello Nixers!

I visit NixOS annually to see the progress (like a comet?). This is my 2.5 year visit.

NixOS Visit Report
============
Visit 1:
VirtualBox install under OS X fails
VirtualBox install under Ubuntu Intrepid success!
Competitive landscape: Haiku r1 works great right out of the box.
+s Great helpful community
-s tedious to set up
time invested: 5 days?? No it can't be.

Visit 2:
VirtualBox install under Ubuntu Intrepid fails!
Tedious configuration.nix editing incantations; reading mail archives, NixOS docs (nice logo)
Competitive landscape: Haiku R2 update slower than R1 but only requires 128MB of memory!
time invested: 12 hours?? No it can't be.

Visit 2.5
NixOS pre22737 VirtualBox install under OS X success! Intel E2200 disable VB VT-X enable PAE
+Very nice liveCD the desktop looks very slick (slim)!
+ Installs yay!
+ Community remains small but incredibly helpful
- Installed NixOS lacks window manager
- Installed NixOS should come up looking like LiveCD
- Still highly tedious setup
- VirtualBox additions where?
- way too much reading of manual, and mainly mail archives
Competitive landscape: OpenSolaris 2010.03 crawls on budget hardware. don't bother. Pretty nice on even 10 year old server hardware though.
time invested: 8 hours? Still spendy willing to visit again though.

Keep up the good work; looking forward to Visit 3

Adventures with OpenSolaris 2010.03 and the DL380

I ordered up three 36GB U320 disks for the ol'serverbeast (DL380 G3). It lives in a closet now where the loud fan noise is bearable.

Whoa! OpenSolaris not too linuxy at all. Curious about the ZFS hoopla. Maybe look into zones.

My own OpenSolaris cheatsheet (some useful commands):
System, version???
uname -a
SunOS kestrel 5.11 snv_134 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris

Using the package manager (there's a GUI, but my box is headless)

= = = AMP (Apache Mysql Php)= = =

add software repo:
sudo pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/webstack webstack.opensolaris.org
sudo pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib contrib.opensolaris.org

look for the AMP (apache mysql php) package:
pkg search amp

install the AMP (apache mysql php) package:
sudo pkg install amp

Activate and start installed AMP
pfexec /usr/sbin/svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/network/http-apache22.xml
pfexec /usr/sbin/svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/application/database/mysql_51.xml

pfexec /usr/sbin/svcadm enable network/http
pfexec /usr/sbin/svcadm enable database/mysql:version_51

replace enable with disable to turn these services off.
more info.

VirtualBox OS X host / OpenSolaris 2010.03 guest is sucking down all the free memory I have.
Lets find out what's going on
df -k -F tmpfs and
echo "::memstat" | mdb -k

swap -l

Uggh; can't find anything.

Glassfish
Installing glassfish.
Using glassfish in production.

securing MAMP

I want to set up a web site for our school garden. I have a piece of high industrial art called a Mac G4 Cube that could serve this purpose well.

Since I am a parent I don't have a lot of time to configure apache, mysql and probably joomla (content management) and its too error prone to do it that way (easy Boris I'm not talking about you who do it all the time). I turn to MAMP.

But I need to secure MAMP to put it out on the actual net (not just my little home net). I'll walk you through it as soon as a I am finished zapping some turkey meatballs.


Resources:
http://www.leifohman.com/pgSamples/SecureWamp.aspx
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

bitnami LAMP install unattended install

I love bitnami because it makes installing Joomla, Alfresco, and Redmine a snap.
I turned to the QuickStart Guide (nice, I wish more software came with one) but it misspelled the password command (where do I file a bug?)

You can see the correct options by using bitnami-lampstack-1.2-0-linux-installer.bin --help
This worked:


sudo /home/mohish/bitnami-lampstack-1.2-0-linux-installer.bin --mode unattended --base_password MY_password


Frugal IT

Could one run an ultra-frugal IT operation on a mixture of 10-year old server hardware, linux, consumer grade hw and yahoo, twitter, google for other stuff?

I am not seeing the value of the multiply redundant server over just building a generic low power server with a few big SATA drives. So what's not to love about 8 TB of space and an almost silent server. It's certainly a lot cheaper in utilities.

If only Oracle made VirtualBox networking easy that might be a good place for the old DL380-ish machines.

SUSE SLES10 SP2, 15" Dell LCD, Proliant DL380 G3

This has been driving me nuts for years. I have one of these very loud beasts (Proliant DL380 G3) but it never worked right with the lcd monitor. Run of the mill 15" Dell LCD 1500FP from about 10 years ago. Searched everywhere, found some informative tidbits, including a configurator and also helpful specs from DELL.

The revelation was throughout the SLES10 SP2 installation process the video looked perfect only when the installation finished did the monitor freak out and say Out of Sync.

So I wasted 6+ hours reading /etc/X11/xorg.conf, messing with SaX2 and reading the log. Instead what worked for me was:

1. Gather as much information as you from the specs page especially the Horizontal Sync in kHz, the Vertical Sync in Hz and the Pixel/Dot Clock Frequency MHz. For the 1500FP it was hsync 48.3 vsync 60 and px clock 65.
2. Enter 48.3, 60, 65 into the configurator and it will generate the correct modeline
3. Before you finish the SLES10 install, test the graphics hardware configuration. Don't let SaX confuse you change the monitor to VESA, 1028 x 768 @ 60 Hz and it shows up correctly.

Ahhh now to update some Smart Array firmware.


PS: Wait! Where do you use the modeline you ask? Well one of these days you'll accidentally click on SaX2 and if your settings get blown away you can try using your generate modeline!

Joomla how to change article time stamp in JA Purity II template

Because Joomla does not support Daylight Savings Time or any Timezone that adjusts for Summer and Winter time etc. I wound up first specifying another Timezone just to get the correct time displayed. Then I realized that would be wrong too.

So I wanted to delete the time from the article date/time stamp so I did this:


Edit the following files:

htdocs/templates/ja_purity_ii/html/com_content/
frontpage/default_item.php
section/blog_item.php
category/blog_item.php
article/default.php

I replaced
LC2 with LC3 and vooop no more incorrect time, just the date.



article->created, JText::_('DATE_FORMAT_LC3')) ?>



Joomla 1.5.15

Daylight Savings Time not supported!


Akeeba (was JoomlaPack) backup and restore. Free opensource. Awesome package. Restore not as obvious as Backup.
Spent approx 15+ hours trying to restore until I figured out
that the password in configuration.php that comes with Akeeba needs to be updated with the
mysql database password from the target joomla installation's configuration.php file.

Building FireFox on Mac OS X 10.6 SnowLeopard

On Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

The 10.5 .mozconfig works fine for Firefox 3.6 called Gecko 1.9.2. The problems start after putting the 10.6 sdk line into .mozconfig many many crashes.

[DRAFT]