by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 10, 2007 | Uncategorized
I previously mentioned how I am not a fan of the new iPods, I did not get a chance to see the touch then yet.
Now I have and I am sold, they are expensive but I think ultimately even without being able to get one in from a cheaper country I’ll end up getting one.
It’s really nice and fun to use, performs and responds quickly to your commands, even coverflow is usable which is what I really want from this device at the moment, a great ipod.
Obviously I would have liked it to be an open platform where I can run 3rd party applications, that would be fantastic. It is not however what I am looking for in an iPod so I am pretty happy to get my hands on one, might do so ‘morrow when I am in the city if they have stock.
The only 2 major missing features in my mind would be more storage and bluetooth, other than that I think it’s the one to have.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 20, 2007 | Uncategorized
Firstly, I am sorry I have not been posting here often, work has become incredibly busy as I recently started a big push in getting my own business off the ground which as anyone know is very time consuming.
Now about the iPods, Apple recently released all new iPods through the whole range and of course the new iPod Touch. I went to the shop to take a look at the iPods (not the touch yet) and have to say I am incredibly disappointed.
Each iPod that has a display now does video, cover flow, animations and a revamped interface, all of this comes at a cost of processing power. Unfortunately it seems the CPUs are not up to it. Consistently throughout the range the interface is sluggish and you end up waiting around for things to happen quite a bit.
The wheel on the classic is also not as precise as you’d want it. I have a old (now dead) iPod and I found it much easier on it to go direct to the song/album I wanted because the wheel was much more accurate.
There are work arounds for the sluggishness – turn off album art – but that distracts from the niceness of the whole thing.
So now I am holding out hopes for the Touch, even though it is too small to hold my music it might be the solution. Reports indicate that the screen is bad compared to the iPhone and so might not be that great.
So have we reached the point where there is no iPod worth buying? I am starting to think so ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 3, 2007 | Front Page
I recently bought a new machine from Layeredtech for my commercial mail anti spam system and am having endless troubles with it. I have a similar machine at Hetzner also running CentOS 5 and it too is having problems, though less frequently.
The short of it is that the drives disconnect, file systems go read only and the box needs a reboot:
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x4)
ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xca Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout)
ata1: soft resetting port
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)
ata1.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x00040000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 226813249
Buffer I/O error on device sda3, logical block 27835568
lost page write due to I/O error on sda3
sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x00040000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 227360961
Buffer I/O error on device sda3, logical block 27904032
lost page write due to I/O error on sda3
So in an effort to figure out if this is a CentOS 5 problem – both ISPs certify CentOS 4 on their hardware – I needed to get my application going on CentOS 4. This turned out to be quite a mission involving getting Exim with MySQL and the recently integrate exiscan rather than the patched version.
I looked at the various options and decided to just backport CentOS 5’s Exim package to CentOS 4.
As it turns out I haven’t yet had a machine re-installed with CentOS 4 as I found some posts suggesting some kernel parameters that might fix things, I’ve applied these now to the machines and wait.
My Exim RPMs can be found below:
exim-4.63-3.src.rpm
exim-4.63-3.i386.rpm
exim-mon-4.63-3.i386.rpm
exim-sa-4.63-3.i386.rpm
As with the CentOS 5 ones you’ll need various DB client libraries installed as this supports speaking to Postgres, MySQL, SQLite etc.
This should be useful to anyone who just wants a more recent version of Exim on their CentOS/RedHat 4 machines.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 30, 2007 | Front Page
This is just a quick heads-up that I am moving this site and most of my services that I offer people to a new server this means for a while things will be odd.
The new machine is still with Blackcat Networks who I never hesitate to recommend to anyone. The new machine was purchased from DNUK who specialize in Linux servers, their service were great and managed to build me a machine that would fit into 0.5Amp power usage easily.
The final spec is a AMD X2 3800+, 2 x 250GB drives and 2GB memory, all happily running at around 0.4Amp. The old server is a Dell 1550 1Ghz PIII, so this will be a very welcome upgrade.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 23, 2007 | Usefull Things
I’ve had the miss-fortune of configuring IPSEC on many FreeBSD machines and other devices in the past and in all cases it’s been a pain, as a result I’ve been putting off securing connections between 3 machines that I knew needed IPSEC.
Last night I figured I may as well start looking at what is involved in building a star topology between the three hosts where comms between each node and each other node is encrypted. Turns out it could not possibly have been simpler.
This is well documented in the RedHat docs – RHEL 3, RHEL 4, RHEL 5 – but it’s worth repeating because it really is clean and simple and elegant.
Being that these are point-to-point tunnels it makes a lot of sense to see the connections as new network cards and this is the approach redhat took, simply create /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ipsecX files where X is any number. This is a sample:
DST=x.x.x.x
TYPE=IPSEC
ONBOOT=yes
IKE_METHOD=PSK |
DST=x.x.x.x
TYPE=IPSEC
ONBOOT=yes
IKE_METHOD=PSK
And do the same on your other host. Now create a pre-shared key in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-ipsecX with file mode 600:
This key has to be the same on both hosts, run ifup ipsecX and it should negotiate, check /var/log/messages for diagnostics.
It is that easy, you can use tcpdump to verify that all is working good.
Under the covers the redhat scripts still use racoon and all the standard stuff, it creates files in /etc/racoon and you can use tools such as setkey etc to diagnose problems.
This is a simple p2p VPN, the RedHat docs shows how to do it on your gateway device – it’s as simple.
