March 2006 Archives

I've been working on the next generation of the Fozzolog weblog framework for a while now. This new generation is likely to be worth showing the rest of the world (*crosses fingers*).

The new framework makes use of mod_perl and many of my latest favorite Perl modules including, but probably not limited to:

• DBIx::Class
• Apache::Session
• Template Toolkit
• Data::FormValidator
• Cache::Cache
• Image::Magick

One issue I ran into in development was how long it took to render a listing of all weblog entries, especially if there are many entries. My thoughts first went to the database, so I tried a couple things to optimize data retrieval. First, I dropped the body text from the entries in the SQL query so the results were smaller. That seemed to make things a tiny bit faster, but not much. Next, I used Cache::Cache to cache the results because a listing of all weblog entries doesn't change very often. That made a difference, but it still took six seconds to list all my entries.

I thought I'd give a short review of my experience so far running Fedora Core 5 on my laptop. First, a brief review of the specs of the computer.

• HP Pavilion zv5000z
• AMD Athlon64 3000
• 512MB RAM
• 1680x1050 display
• NVidia GeForce4 420 Go display adapter
• Texas Instruments firewire and PCMCIA chipsets
• Synaptics touchpad
• 100 GB hard drive
• CD/DVD Combo drive

And, I use a Netgear 802.11g cardbus PCMCIA adapter which is supported by the madwifi Linux driver.

I have been running the x86_64 version of Linux on this laptop.

First impressions

Out of the box, FC5 works very well. Many more things "just worked" whereas they didn't work so well with FC4 and FC3.

The look and feel of FC5 is polished and clean. The Fedora project seems to be distancing itself from Red Hat and trying to create its own distinct identity. A fluid "f" cut out of an angled figure-8 is the mark of Fedora. The red hat icon is gone as the proverbial "start" button and replaced with an "f" icon. This almost completes Fedora's rite of passage which started with renaming all the redhat-config-* utilities to system-config-*.

What didn't go so well?

To get the Netgear cardbus adapter working, I had to employ some old tricks I learned from my experiences with FC3 and FC4. First, I had to add a couple lines to the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file:

include memory 0xe0100000-0xe17fffff
include port 0x3000-0x7fff

The cardbus card would (again) not be recognized unless this command is run: /sbin/setpci -s 0:a.0 SUBORDINATE_BUS=0A. I put it in /etc/rc.local.

Then, I needed to install the madwifi driver to access the Netgear card, but I knew LIVNA had RPMs for it before, so I checked to see if they had FC5 RPMs yet or if I could just grab a source RPM and build it myself.

LIVNA had the RPM I needed and I grabed the source RPM too because I knew I might need to compile it for a new kernel soon.

Well, as I type this, I'm using the wireless card, so it's working.

kpilot

The kpilot/korganizer applications haven't worked with my Palm Treo 650 since FC3. It's nice to see they're working again. This was a combination of kernel issues and KDE issues.

"There are no graduates. The learning never stops." -- Rush Limbaugh says that every once in a while when identifying the Rush Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservatives Studies.

I like the mantra, today it applies to me, and I think it should apply to everyone in the open source community.

We recently got a call from a guy with a company out of Utah County who needed some work done on a Linux server. The first meeting took a couple months to set up, but it finally happened about a month ago. Adam and I checked it out. He had a Dell rackmount box that had suffered some hardware failure of some kind. It was a pretty important server, so they hurried and built a new server on other hardware.

This led to them contacting us. Now that the original hardware was fixed, our client wanted us to document everything that was installed and configured on the rebuilt system and duplicate it on the original system -- fixing things that weren't done quite right along the way.

We did all that and delivered a 26 page set of documentation on the system.

Our client then requested that we do two more things. First, he wanted one machine to act as a failover slave to the other. Second, he wanted to do implement a single-signon scenario so that users of the Linux system could use their Windows network usernames and passwords to log into the Linux system via SSH.

I've set up a couple High-Availability Linux clusters before, so I wasn't worried about that, but I hadn't really investigated the single-signon thing before - especially not with Windows as the authentication source.

Turns out the single-signon thing wasn't that difficult. It comes down to a handful of steps:

1. Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and add winbind after files for the passwd and group entries.
2. Configure /etc/krb5.conf with the right Kerberos realm names and server names.
3. Configure /etc/samba/smb.conf with a few winbind parameters like what is shown here.
4. Join the domain with net rpc join -S PDC -U Administrator.
5. Start the winbind service and restart Samba.
6. Edit login and sshd in /etc/pam.d and add lines like auth sufficient /lib/security/pam_winbind.so which tells PAM to use winbind as a source of credential validation.
7. Edit /etc/pam.d/system-auth and add a line session required /lib/security/$ISA/pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel umask=0022 so that PAM will create a home directory (specified by the template homedir directive in the Samba configuration file) when a user successfully logs in for the first time.

And that's pretty much it.

Tonight was my final visit for these projects. We did it after hours so we could take the servers down for IP address changes and what-not. Two to three hours later, I had two servers using heartbeat failover and accepting Windows username and password logins. Very nice.

I really should be in bed now... and I would be if I hadn't been contacted a couple hours ago by one of our clients. They were having trouble getting PHP 5.1.2 built on a Red Hat Linux 9.0 system.

In other words, a lame situation. RH9 hasn't been supported in... forever. PHP is just lame, period, but we do what we can.

This client isn't yet comfortable with building from source RPMs, so I told them I would take care of it. I've been building all kinds of dependencies for the last couple of hours just so I could build PHP from source. It looks like it's finally working.

It's going to take a while, though. This system is only a Pentium-II 450 Mhz. Yeah, that's another thing about this particular client. They like to keep using old hardware. I'm not really sure what's up with that.

Visiting Mussolini in Colorado

One reason I really should be in bed right now is because I'm supposed to be on the road in less than six hours to pick up my bandmates Thom and Daryn so we can join Matt and Tim and head to Steamboat Springs, CO for the first of two Sons Of Nothing shows.

Fun, right? Except the weather forecast is foreboding. A snowstorm is about to start dropping on us. I'm hoping by taking a southern route -- via US 40 -- we'll be spared some.

So, hopefully, the next update will be from CO.