linux

Continuing my "avoid the console" series, I'm going to cover remotely managing partitions on a Linux server. Yes, this will involve a bit of console, but this will set you on a path to using GUI tools on your servers without having to install a complete windowing environment. Installing a complete desktop-like environment is a waste of resources for most servers, so keeping things to a minimum helps to streamline and allow your servers to do more things with less hardware.

A lot of new Linux users don't realize it, but a Linux desktop has both a "server" and a "client" for drawing things on the screen. This allows you to separate the program's interface from the machine it's running on and display it remotely.

The most powerful way to remotely manage Linux servers is using the SSH (Secure SHell.) It's like a DOS prompt for your server that you can use securely and remotely. The beauty is that if set up properly, it can tunnel a windowed program through that connection to display on your local desktop. Just don't get confused as to what is running where.

For the average joe computer user, if you ask them to "open a console" on their computer they'll stare at you dumbly. For the uninitiated the "console" is the Linux equivalent (loosly) of the "command prompt" or "dos prompt".

So, I just don't understand why it is that a lot of Linux sites and magazines (yes, I'm talking to you, Linux Journal!) insist on forcing the console on everyone for tasks that are just as easy to do without it. Yes, it's nice to know how, and there certainly needs to be a way to find out more about the console, but I firmly believe the console should be reserved for power users and not try to force it on everyone.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not really dissing on Linux Journal. It's a great magazine and it's really targeted more towards the power users like me who will use the console on a daily basis even if you show us a GUI (Graphical User Interface - something everyone has been using since before 1995) that is 10x faster for most people. It's just that the Linux Journal articles recently got me thinking about Linux broadscale desktop adoption.

Perspective

Anyone else see anything wrong with this screenshot?

Yeah, weird, huh? For some reason it was reporting my disk usage as a NEGATIVE number. I've never seen that before. I found it because ZoneMinder had stopped recording for some reason - it thought I was out of hard disk space when in actuality there's very little drive used. A quick reboot fixed the problem. Lucky for me there's nothing important on this box - it's simply for zoneminder and watching Hulu or streaming my MythTV recordings to my bedroom. I think this happened after our power spike and outage the other day. This particular PC isn't on a UPS.

Well, it seems they still haven't made any progress at making the Compiz graphics effects work on a multi-GPU setup, but you can run two X screens each using two monitors and keep the Compiz effects. If you want to grab and drag windows across all four monitors, you lose the cool graphics effects.

Here's what it might look like though using four monitors of three different sizes using xinerama without Compiz on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 with two nVidia cards, each driving two monitors:

I decided it was time to place a PXE boot install image on my network for installing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid desktops. For the most part everything went as expected (see this post) but during the install I got an error that "restricted/binary-amd64/Packages was corrupt".

It turns out there are no restricted packages on the alternate installer image, and the lack of an empty "Packages" file at "/dists/lucid/restricted/binary-amd64" where the networked install image is located was causing it to bomb.

Simply doing

touch Packages

in that shared directory within the install image seems to have fixed the issue. For some reason the fact that the Packages.gz ungzips into a zero byte file was throwing it, but having an already existing zero byte file seemed to fix it.

You've heard of community developed software. What about community developed advertising?

The Linux Foundation has announced a new job posting website dedicated for Linux. That's right - people get paid to work with Linux.

But, why do companies do this to themselves? The listings include things such as one for a "Director of Technology" that states "you should be comfortable with OO Perl, databases (especially MySQL), ORMs such as DBIx, etc." or one requiring "Strong Scripting skills, Perl or Korn Shell."

Others state you must be conversant in "ASP.NET", "MS SQL 2005 / 2008" and "Active Directory" though I'm unsure why anyone wanting to hire a Linux person, where the best ones traditionally will be very anti-Microsoft, would need those skills. Perhaps the poster missed the fact that the domain name ended with "linux.com"

The biggest thing that jumps out at me is how many of the job postings required expertise in obscure or outdated technologies. I'm sorry, but I lump Perl in with that bunch. There has to become a point at which it's easier to build from scratch a version 2.0 of whatever it is that you do, than to try to continue to maintain 150,000 lines of Perl code even when integrated with DBIx. Languages like PHP and even Python allow developers to write cleaner, easier to read code in half the time.

I've used tripwire for years, but since I rarely configure it I always have to read back up on some of the tutorials I have on how to properly set it up.

One thing that almost every tutorial misses is how to actually make Tripwire email reports when run. They all cover where to put the email addresses and settings, but most skip how to actually trigger that to happen. You must use a specific command line argument to cause Tripwire to send the actual report.

So, here it is for future reference:

tripwire --check --email-report

I finally found the photo manager for me to use in Linux. I'd tried all the major apps, but none of them worked properly with the Olympus .orf raw format. Even the leader, FSpot, wouldn't display the images. It relies on an embedded JPG thumbnail inside the raw image, but my Oly camera doesn't put that image there.

I had originally started working on writing my own in Python, but I haven't really had the time to dedicate to it. I had heard about an application called GQview, but it turned out that it wouldn't display my raw images either.

Then I heard about Geeqie Viewer which is a branch off of the GQview program. GQview hasn't been actively developed in some time, so in the true open source tradition someone took the original source and revamped it while adding new features.

If you're like me and want to access a library of photos on multiple computers possibly from thumbdrives, DVD or external hard drives, going with a program that keeps it's own internal database just won't work. Geeqie allows you to just use folders for organizing your photos, while giving you the ability to still add keywords and comments.

Our receptionist PC motherboard was dying, so I threw together a new $400 PC from a barebones MSI box, an enterprise-grade HD, a Celeron 64 bit CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Simple and easy.

Restoring the PC to operational status was very easy because of the PXE boot setup, our Puppet installation, and the use of Duplicity for backups.

I simply booted the new hardware (note the lack of DVD, CD or floppy drive) from the network, picked to install Ubuntu 64 bit and gave it the same hostname as her old PC. Then I walked away. Literally only 10 minutes from unpacking until the PC was installing it's OS unattended.

I came back about 20 minutes later to a newly installed OS with all updates and patches already applied. Then I just ran a single duplicity command line to restore the home directory from the backups and voila!

Yeah, Linux network administration is awesome.