Linux Desktops

I've ran into too many articles about Linux desktop lately. They often named - Is this the year of Linux?, The future of Linux desktop, Linux desktop versus Windows, Dumping Vista for Linux, etc...

I am making a living using Linux. I compile, build, hack Linux almost everyday. Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. It's stable, configurable, easy to admin. I am just tired of hearing about Linux desktops.

To be honest, I don't really care about the future of Linux desktop. Maybe I am selfish. I guess I am in a comfort zone with Linux running on the server end. I don't like Linux loosing focus. That's how I also feel about the huge number of distributions out there. Why? Why wasting your time on that but instead of focus on just a few distributions?

Going to the desktop direction, to me, is the popularity contest. I rather stay out of it. I enjoy the Apple vs Microsoft commercials.

Network monitoring

Today, I ran into a nice app for network monitoring, iftop. It is now a new member in my favorite network traffic monitoring list:


iptraf
airtraf
airsnort
ettercap
ntop
iftop
etherape
ethereal

Email blacklists

I've been using blaklists (spamhaus, spamcop, etc...)for a while to block messages from spammers. Lately, whenever I am running my server using these dnsbl with sendmail, I am automatically get subscribed to spamhaus and other blacklists. This makes me think that spammers are finding a way to automatically subscribed to these blacklists and forcing me to remove it from my sendmail.cf so we can start sending out our emails.

I am looking for a way to make these "rejected" messages to go to /dev/null but I haven't been able to mess with sendmail.cf to get it to work.

Frustrated...

Fedora Core 7

To many users, releasing new software with the pace like Fedora is doing right now can be very exciting. To me, it's a bit scary. I just installed Fedora Core 5 a couple months ago and now, it's 7. My main concerns are:

1. What if people stop focusing on old versions? If I need an rpm package, I have to dig for fc5 release and all I could find are newer versions. I am stuck. I can't get my NIC driver to work on FC5. Well, then the answer would be.. upgrade! I can't just upgrade the servers over night. I am running 20 servers with the same version.... in a cluster. I can't keep up, I am feeling like I am being left behind.

2. So a new user just managed to order a Fedora Core 6 CD. Now, it's obsolete. We all know how it feels like to be outdated, specially the IT folks. As a result, new users will just basically give up.

I like Fedora and I will try to continue to use it. I just hope that one day, I don't have to pay the price for either because I am not upgrading or because I upgraded. May be I am not the type of users that Fedora is targeting. May be I belong to Debian.

Got my new toy

The company just got me a new toy today. I asked for it because I need access to the internet, well, SSH to the servers wherever I go. I looked online and found that the Verizon XV8700 has a nice keyboard. WM5 is installed on it. I guess it goes against my religion to purchase another MS product but I have no other options at this time since I have to be on the roads soon.

Talking about MS, what's up with the lawsuits that they are filing against Linux? I think it is quite silly of them. Why now? Right after they filed the lawsuits, Gate announced that Vista is doing extremely well, that MS is going 64-bit, that a few weeks earlier, Dell announced that they will put Ubuntu on some of their desktops and laptops. May be MS is sensing something urgent, something is threatening the future of Windows. Perhaps, they want to strike fears in the hearts of those who are thinking of converting. Very interesting move nonetheless.

I hope I'll enjoy my new toy. PocketPuTTY, here I come...

Clone Linux Hard Drives

Thanks to the live distributions out there, cloning Linux hard drives is much easier these days. I am leaving dump behind and just using Ubuntu to clone them.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb &

That's the command to copy sda to sdb. Notice that large hard drives will take a while. My 250G drive took about 6 hours.

Media WIKI installation

Installing mediawiki today. It's been a while. I didn't expect SELinux can cause such a problem.
Because my database isn't locate locally, SELinux won't allow me to connect to MySQL on another server. Usually, I disable SELinux via /etc/selinux/config but I'll have to reboot it. Just found out that you can do this on the fly.

setenforce 0 (to disable SELinux)
setenforce 1 (to enableSELinux )

Well, that solved my problem with wiki.

VMWare is too cool

This VMWare thing is too cool and even better, FREE. Their company just went IPO last week. I think they are going to be a great company. Of course, I am hoping for them to continue offering this awesome free software. I just recently come back to it a few months ago. They didn't impress me a few years back. I've tried other things such as LTSP. LTSP is nice but I like the idea of running multiple OS's at once. I am messing around with cloning or duplicating the virtual machine in VMWare and here is what I found for duplicating db1 to db2.

Go to /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines and do:

cp -ax db1 db2
cd db2
vmware-vdiskmanager -n db1.vmdk db2.vmdk
mv db1 db2
sed -i 's/db1.vmdk/db2.vmdk/' db2

Restart the server console. If you don't see db2 on the menu, just click on File->Open->You know how to take it from here.


Enjoy...

Uninstall OpenOffice

Sadly, I have to start with my experience of uninstalling OpenOffice on my XP machine. It took me a while to uninstall it because I removed the location of the original installer. I didn't know that would cause such a pain. But here is what I found.

1. Using regedit and go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER-Software-Microsoft-Installer-Products

or

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE-Classes-Installer-Products

3. Scroll down on the list there and look for the one that has OpenOffice in the ProductName field.
4. Remove that folder under the Products tree. It should be bunch of numbers.

That's it. It worked for me. I was able to install the newer version of OpenOffice.

If you can't find them there, download regmon from MS and run the installer, it will tell you the location of that registry. You might want to filter for what you need to find when running regmon.

Oh.. remember to backup your registry just in case.

Opening...

I've been using Linux since 1997 when RedHat 5.2 just came out. I got a copy from my computer science prof in college and it basically changed my life. As a Linux systems admin, I wanted to dedicate my time mostly on Linux but it seems inevitable that there is a portion on my time that I still have to dedicate to Microsoft no mater where I go. This blog is mostly on my IT life in general. There will be Linux, MS, and networking talks...and definitely biased. You guess it.