midtoad’s mess.ages
excellence in creative mediocrity

My apologies - too many late nights working on a new server set-up have addled my brain. I went to work today and didn’t notice that my server was off-line until someone asked me about later. Back up now, though (obviously), 12 hours later.

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If you haven’t heard of del.icio.us yet, take a look!

Del.icio.us has an interesting concept, one that I didn’t understand at first even though I was using its service. Each day I open up a browser and point it at del.icio.us/tag/python. I get a page with what looks like an RSS news feed: a listing of a number of links about the Python programming language, some of them with descriptions, but others not. I didn’t understand where these links were coming from, or who can post, and how, on the service. Then I read a post on woyp, and decided to take a closer look.
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This morning I couldn’t get any response from any external website using my browser from any of my home network PCs - except from Gmail through a wireless connection on my PDA. Very strange.

Then I tried to renew the IP address on my DMZ’ed webserver, and it failed. Soon after, my WinXP box complained that it had an IP conflict with another machine on the network. Clearly, something was amiss with my router, since it serves up IP addresses. I decided to re-boot it. Moments later, I was back in business!

In all the years running SMEserver, I never had this issue. Now I’ve had it in less than a week with the Linksys router. Not a good start!

… 12 hours later … I discovered that my webserver had shut itself off sometime this morning, so my website was off-line all day. Since my webserver is connected to an industrial-strength UPS, I’m at a loss to explain how this could have happened. Hmm, unless somehow someone got into my system, got a console up, and typed “shutdown fhn now” !

It took several hours to get my WordPress blog running on my new webserver, but only a couple of minutes to get the Flight Poetry site back in action. That’s because both of those sections make use of a mySQL database. Solving the problems of setting up one of them gave me the keys to quickly setting up the second.

Enjoy the website!

If you can read this, that’s good, because it means I finally have my new webserver set-up and running.

Yesterday I began the process of replacing my SMEserver Linux distribution with Mandrake 10.1. I’ve moved to this distro to enjoy consistency with my desktop PCs, and to have more flexibility on software installations on my webserver itself.

First step was to back everything up to another PC. I had a bit of a scare when I couldn’t find the datafiles for this blog, but eventually I located them in another spot. Then came a litany of small problems, each of which I had to solve: I couldn’t get the webserver to be seen from inside the home network. I couldn’t get the webserver to understand any URLs, only IP addresses. I couldn’t get the webserver to read my USB flash key, or my external IDE drive. I couldn’t get root privileges straightened out on the webserver. I couldn’t get mySQL running; I couldn’t get a user account for this blog database created.

Now that I’m able to post, it’s time to go to bed. The rest of the set-up will have to wait until tomorrow.

I’m making some changes to the topology of my home network. It all resulted from try to test out a new Python app. I ran into some hurdles because of my SME Server’s linux distro, which doesn’t including support for the Tkinter GUI, yet doesn’t allow me to build and compile a new version of Python. I’m getting frustrated with the template system that prevents me from using normal .rpm files from other distros. I began to wonder if I could do better.

I’ve rescusitated an older Linksys wired router with built-in firewall. After a few false starts, I managed to get one computer on my network talking to the internet through the firewall. Good! Then I reconfigured my SME Server so that it was no longer providing gateway functionality for my network, but was functioning only as a server. From the firewall’s perspective, it’s in a DMZ, separate from the rest of the network. Proof that it all works is me typing up this note!

Now to test out a version of Mandrake Linux 10.2 for possible replacement of SME Server. Since I’m already familiar with it on my desktop, I have a better chance of being able to manage it on my server.

I’ve updated my page on the OLC, the On Line Contest for hang glider and paraglider pilots. You can find useful information there, a PDF version of a PowerPoint presentation that walks you through the entire process of submitting a flight to OLC, and the latest copy of the MaxPunkte software.

This year, as of May 1st, you’ll be able to use your OLC entries as verification for your CIVL badge requirements, so it’s useful to get acquainted with the submitting process.

From a recent study on Application Platform Strategies by the Burton Group :

The P-Languages: PHP, Perl, and Python for Enterprise Scripting:

“PHP, Perl, and Python (the P-Languages) are scripting languages suitable for web development, system administration, and integration. In the proper context, they can be five times more productive than general-purpose languages such as C++, Java, and C#. In this Application Platform Strategies overview, Burton Group Analyst Richard Monson-Haefel discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the P-Languages in enterprise application development.”

Did you know that the Google search engine is available in many different languages? Over 100 were available, at last count. Google has a sense of humour, too. Some of the languages available include the following:

• Bork, bork, bork!
• Elmer Fudd
• Hacker
• Klingon
• Pig Latin

Take a look on their language page.

Two good articles on coding practices that should be good reading for anyone working as a developer:

• How to write maintainable code, by Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent)
• The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric S. Raymond

here’s a proposal for a template for coding practices. The two attached modules (written in Python, but applicable to other languages as well) demonstrate the following principles:
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Recently when I started up my PC, fsck checked my /home folder and found a number of errors, including bad blocks. When it was done, I had over 2000 files in my /home/lost+found folder. How to tell if any of them are worth keeping, or are merely duplicates of something else? Can I safely delete them?

Rather than go through all 2000 by hand, I wrote a little script in python to examine the first line of each file, then tell me what it had found. Naturally, as I went along, I made improvements to the file. In the end it was able to check whether any of the files were mail files, html, png, xml, c++ or other files. The ones that I could identify were moved into another folder for safe-keeping.

Here’s the script (.py file saved as .txt) that I used:
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The image below summarizes the new CIVL badge levels, which will become effective as of May 1st, 2005. Any questions?
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