Mine the Harvest

The CCNA (Cisco Certified Networking Associate) class I am taking at St. Pete College required a paper and presentation as one of its primary projects. My two lab mates and I decided to have our area of focus be on Linux (yes – surprising I know) and its role in a network environment. The paper and Power Point presentation are here. This was an introductory presentation to enlighten students new to networking or IT on the roles Linux plays in networking and environments such as data center, enterprise and small to medium business. 80% of the audience had no experience with Linux, so this was definitely an introductory talk.

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Last week I configured a VPN running between my house and server at work using OpenVPN. The configuration of OpenVPN on the server and client was extremely simple and I wrote a wiki article on it. I highly recommend looking into this if you need an OpenSource VPN solution. It literally took a few minutes to get is deployed as far as the VPN itself. I suggest you just try the mini how-to for initial deployment and then expand on that as needed.

I did have to compile a kernel module for the tun device on one server which a colleague assisted me with – but it was very straight forward and the steps I took to do so are here (see kernel and module configuration) should you need to do the same. It’s not a step by step how to, but certainly gives the broad overview on what to do. You likely won’t even need this though as most distro’s include the tun device, just do an lsmod and look for it. If not though, compiling the module will generally follow the steps described on the wiki.

Once the VPN was running all kinds of fun things are possible, but the primary reason I did this was to use BackupPC to back up my home PCs. I have another blog post on BackupPC and a wiki on it. I very highly recommend this as a backup solution for both your servers at work and even for personal use.  I think it is superior to Backula or Amanda – though setting it up can be a tad beastly. Once configured though – it is the bomb.

Last week I upgraded the blog software (which drives this wonder of technology blog site) to the latest WordPress 2.5. The upgrade went very well, though there was one database change that caused an issue with comments not showing up correctly in the management interface. It would say there were comments waiting but not display them when you clicked the link. This was due to a new field being added to the wp_comments database which needs to be indexed.

The WordPress forums do have a mention of this, but it is a bit buried and the fix may elude some users. After Googling a bit it was easy to see the issue was due to a database schema change in the wp_comments table.

The solution is simple, and you can do it in the mysql client (for you shell happy guys) or using phpmyadmin.

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Last weekend we made another weekend dive trip to Jupiter Florida, just north of West Palm on the Atlantic side. This was our third dive trip there and the first time we went specifically to see the Lemon sharks! They come in during the winter when the water temps fall and aggregate, the females still pregnant. Unfortunately the water temps have not gotten cold enough this winter, the Gulf Stream is still way to warm to cause them to come closer to land. So while our efforts to see Lemon sharks were not too successful, we still had some good dives.

We had two dives on Saturday and two on Sunday. All were boat dive dives where we drifted along the reef ledges which parallel the coast about a half mile off shore. Depths were about 65′ and all dives were done on Nitrox. The water temp was about 68 Deg. (Brrrr…) but had only dropped that morning, so no effect on the shark migration. The week before temps were in the low 70’s. Visibility was not too fantastic, about 25′ to 30′. There was some pretty strong current on the first day, about 3 knots so it was zipping along on the bottom. If you grab the reef (safely) the current would whip you around like a wind sock and you would hold on – suspended and flying above the reef.

A recently certified diver from work (Max) meet us in Jupiter for this trip, and he sure had a stiff gradient to meet on these dives! With all the factors they were definitely not really beginner dives, but he did great – despite this being his first boat dives, first Ocean dives, first dives with strong current, etc. Unfortunately he injured his should pretty darn good during entry on the first dive, but he was able to still do the second dive. After the dives it continued to be inflamed and called for a trip to the doctor. No torn rotator cup fortunately, but definitely put caused some inflammation. He is recovering well though and is looking forward to his next boat trip. Way to go Max – good job on these dives – it was a huge learning step and I look forward to our next trip!

We did see some good marine life though: a huge sea turtle, spotted moray eels, a big old grouper (450 pounder?), Christmas tree worms, and of course a variety of tropicals: angel fish, parrot fish, etc.

We did for once take a picture of the dive boat! Yes, at long last a picture to show we actually do go diving and don’t just make up the stories! Neither of us is of course in the picture, so I guess it still does not prove this was us. This pictures also shows that as captain, you need not fear and can be comfortable in any attire you choose.

The teen who crewed as the deck had recommended a breakfast spot called Center Street Nook for the next morning, and we took her advice. Located just a few blocks from the dive shop its a perfect breakfast place and the food was quite good. Check it out if you dive Jupiter. The kitchen door had a good dose of humor:

One of the best elements of the place was their coffee cups. They apparently have great “Deserts” (we didn’t find out) and advertise a variety of services, so you can contemplate these as you enjoy your morning Joe.

Another great Dive trip to Jupiter. We have enjoyed it each time and we look forward to our next trip there. The water will be warming up soon and hopefully next time we will have better viz. We will let you know!

I wrote up this page to entice some co-workers to go. It was not very effective, but should you like a bit of humor:

Until next time!

Last year I had some fun getting an OS X virtual machine  running under VM Ware server on my Windows box. (That was a geeky thing back then.) That box since died and I built a new system with Open Suse 10.3 as the primary OS. I installed VM Ware server and rounded up the Virtual Machine files I had made for this OS X Virtual Machine under Windows and just copied them into the new Linux environment. Honestly, I thought it would likely choke – I didn’t expect simply dropping the VM files into the Linux install to actually work – it did.

I find it greatly amusing to run OS X on my regular old Intel P4 2.8 generic system. It runs pretty much perfectly, though is slow given the fact the underlying Linux OS and the hosted OS X VM are all running on 512MB or memory, hehehe . . . All the more humor.

Getting the VM configured the first time required a few install attempts and a couple partitioning attempts from the install disk. If you want to run OS X on an generic Intel platform I found this site to be very helpful: http://www.osx86project.org/

Here is the underlying Linux host OS, Open Suse 10.3 running VMWare Server:

And here is the OS X running as a Guest OS:

I truly love VM Ware. You can run multiple different OSes simultaneously and switch effortless between them – Linux, Solaris, OS X, Windows – all running nicely. You can even make a virtual machine from your existing physical machines and move the entire install around to different hardware as though it were basically a file. You can also download many ready to go virtual machine appliances for all manner of purposes to test drive, all without having to install the OS and stack needed – download a virtual appliance to check out Wikipedia, or check out pfsense – a FreeBSD firewall appliance – and you won’t even have to bleed getting it all set up and sacrificing to the BSD Gods – just install and run the entire environment virtually.

I first started playing around running Virtual Machines about a year and a half ago. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. If you have not already, I highly suggest you play around with this. At long last, running whatever platform I want with easy. Wow, I remember talking about how nice that would be . . . someday. The frustration of trying to get multiple OSes to get along with each other, etc. All that is basically history. This makes me feel like a kid again – it’s what I always wanted to be able to do. While virtualizaton  is hardly new technology – the easy of use (and low cost) it has reached is unparalleled.