It is almost time to retire my perl based bloging server software known as blosxom. It has performed well. However, my page count is starting to get high, and blosxom is taking longer and longer to process. For now, I've moved it to faster hardware while I work on a different blog delivery mechanism (I hope to have Wt on C++ with PostgreSQL running the back-end soon). Continue reading "Blosxom Reinstall on Debian Lenny 5.0.1" »
Sunday, June 28. 2009
Blosxom Reinstall on Debian Lenny 5.0.1
Perl Mason Install
Installing mason v1.42 from Mason HQ is quite straight-forward:
- apt-get install build-essential
- apt-get install libapache2-mod-apreq2
- apt-get install libapreq2-dev
- apt-get install libapache2-request-perl
- ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/apreq.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/apreq.load
- perl -MCPAN -eshell
- install HTML::Mason
VMWare Mouse Release on Debian Lenny Guest
A simple message to myself. When installing a Debian Lenny 5.0.1 KDE guest in VMWare Workstation hosted on Windows XP, a few steps are required in order to move into and out of the guest without the ctrl-alt mouse release sequence:
- apt-get install build-essential on the guest
- apt-get install linux-headers-...
- build and install the VMWare toolkit in the guest
- add 'Option "CorePointer"' to the mouse section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- add 'Option "CoreKeyBoard"' to the keyboard section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- restart KDE
A visit to a VMWare Community describes a couple of additional steps for getting the VMWare Shared Folders (HGFS) Share to work inside of Lenny 5.0.1 as well. Basically, in the /etc/fstab file, which VMWare updates when you perform a tool install, append ',uid=1000,gid=1000' to the 'ttl=5' portion of the .host line, so it looks something like:
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
The actual value to be used in place of 1000 is what ever your uid,gid are for your current window session. This an be determined at the command line by:
echo ${UID}
Without the uid/gid values in the fstab file, the share is made available for the root user. Anyway, after the restart, by using the file explorer, go to /mnt/hgfs to see the volumes.
Web Statistics with awstats on Debian Lenny 5.0.1
On an old system, I used Webalizer to analyze Apache log files. On a newer system I thought I'd give awstats a try. I had two options, install via the original source, or install via apt-get. Considering the number of files and directories involved, I decided to go with the Debian package manager to install awstats. Continue reading "Web Statistics with awstats on Debian Lenny 5.0.1" »
Saturday, June 27. 2009
Network Broadcast Addresses
A customer was performing penetration testing on their network. Once the test results were in, among other things, they had a couple questions about responses to certain addresses on their external subnet range. Continue reading "Network Broadcast Addresses" »
Securely Erasing Files
On a Linux system, there are a number of tools available for over-writing a file with random data and then deleting the file and hiding the name of the name of the file as well. Continue reading "Securely Erasing Files" »
Wednesday, June 17. 2009
New Release of WTL (Windows Template Library)
I've been able to start on a new project with a clean slate. For the portion residing on Microsoft Windows, I'm going to give the latest version (v8.1, build 9127) of the WTL (Windows Template Library) for crafting the GUI side of things. The latest version can be downloaded from SourceForge, which looks to have a release date of May 7, 2009. Continue reading "New Release of WTL (Windows Template Library)" »
Saturday, June 6. 2009
The American Dream
In a recent issue of Investment News, former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker was quoted as saying: Continue reading "The American Dream" »
Thursday, June 4. 2009
Installing PostgreSQL on Debian Lenny
Release 5.0.1 of Debian's Lenny GNU/Linux distribution includes version 8.3 of PostgreSQL.
During the creation of a new Debian Lenny server, a list of software packages is provided. To make a new PostgreSQL-only server, unselect everything, including the 'Standard system', then select 'SQL Database', and proceed with the installation.
Once installation has completed, and the new server has rebooted, the PostgreSQL service is not auto-started. There are a couple of manual commands to be applied. In prior versions, PostgreSQL was auto-started. I think I understand the reasoning, particularily because it is useful for my situation.
During the server creation, I have a separate set of disks allocated for the database. By manually finishing the PostgreSQL implementation, I am able to initialize the directory location during service creation. If I have I've mounted my drives at /var/local/db, then these two commands get the PostgreSQL 8.3 service started:
pg_createcluster -d /var/local/db 8.3 main /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 start
Monday, June 1. 2009
Building WebGUI 7.7.8 on Debian Lenny
It is a couple of years since I built a WebGUI server. Last one I built was on a Fedora Linux box. Continue reading "Building WebGUI 7.7.8 on Debian Lenny" »