I’ve set the LAN Party link at the top of the page to redirect to a subdomain I just setup: party.sudoseth.com From now on this is where I will update changes to the roster, what games we will play, when, and where. If I get bored I might even add some web forms so that people can RSVP via the site itself.
I stayed at Castle In the Sand. Their WiFi network is more through than it was last year, but there are still some gaps in coverage. By sheer conicedence I stumbled across Ekahau Heatmaper. It’s a low tech solution to mapping out how much wifi signal there is in a given area and then project how much signal should be available in other locations nearby.
Shown above is the map of the hotel’s main WiFi SSID for the guests.
I just got a new iTouch… and apple does not support Windows XP Pro 64 bit. Seriously?
I’ve found a site that tells you how to use MS Orca to run the Vista 64 bit installer in XP, but why should I have to do that. That is just stupid. This is the first time I’ve tried using an Apple product in four years, and so far I am not impressed at all. Four years ago I had an iMac that was about as useful as a boat anchor in my living room.
…Sigh. I’ll just use it on a different computer that still has XP 32 bit.
I travel to frequently and as such need to be able to keep an eye on my servers. I use SSH extensively for this purpose. I’ve been looking for some tools to keep track of bandwidth usage using the command line for a while and recently found some that do exactly what I want.
I found a list that introduced me to a bunch of different tools. Two of my favorites are bmon and bwm-ng. Both of these command line tools can be installed in Ubuntu by using apt-get. technical
I had some spare time today and decided to make use of my Cox internet connection while I still have it. Naturally the only thing to do with an unused connection was to put a Tor exit node on it 
The guide found at ubuntu-tutorials.com was very helpful. In short, simply use “apt-get install tor” to install the software and then edit /etc/tor/torc to change all the settings. It is required to give your endpoint a unique nickname. Read the config file and you’ll be fine. You can then use “sudo /etc/init.d/tor start” to start Tor and “tail -f /var/log/tor/log” to check the status.
If Apache is giving you trouble, or you should screw up the config files beyond recognition, it is possible to wipe Apache out completely and then re-install it. If you’re just playing around with the server this can save you a lot of time. The command to remove apache2 completely is “apt-get remove –purge apache2 apache2-common apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils ssl-cert” You can then reinstall apache using the default values with “apt-get install apache2″ It’s very simple once you know what some of the tricks are
The ext2, 3, and 4 filesystems by default all reserve 5% of their capacity for the root user. While this is very important for partitions that contain /var or / (the root of the operating system), it can be a waste of space in drives that are only used for file storage. After making a ext4 partition I realized that I didn’t change the default setting. Instead of having 3.6TB of usable free space on my new hard drive I only had 3.4TB. After a quick google search I found an Ubuntu forum posting with a similar issue: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-215177.html
The command I used is very simple:
# tune2fs -m 0 /dev/md0
Where /dev/md0 is the partition you are configuring. For more help check out the manual page for tune2fs (# man tune2fs )
This is exactly why I backup as frequently as I do. During this entire process no data was lost.Yesterday my webserver starting acting very strangely. I attempted to upload some photos to my photo gallery. It would not let me create any new content, but I could still view all of my content that was already posted. I SSH’d into the server and found that my system load was at 280 (!!!) and growing by about 2 points per minute. I checked some logs and couldn’t really figure out what was going on. No process was showing a major increase in resource consumption and there were no signs of extra traffic. I tried to close out all of the terminal windows I had open, but two of them would not lose, no matter what I tried (killing processes, etc.). After 225 days of uptime, I figured I should just reboot the system.
I waited a few minutes but the system never came back online (not even enough for me to ping it). I waited untill about 10 minutes after I gave the shutdown command and then forcefully turned it off. I brought it into my room to work on it and plugged it into a monitor to see where the problem was (I usually run my servers headless). I turned on the power and… Read more…