Inverted Reality

BarCamp Perth

Is fast approaching. April 10th to be exact. While I've not been in the past (I was busy last year), I'd like to attend this year, and perhaps even contribute something. I'm just trying to think of some topic's that I could maybe discuss at BarCamp. Here's a list of things I've thought of so far... (I'll pick one): Webmin - A web systems administration package for servers (mainly Linux) Virtualmin - A web hosting administration package for servers Sysadmin on the road - Consultancy and systems administration whilst mobile. Apple iPad demonstration and practical uses in industry (health / medical uses) Social Networking as a business tool Or maybe I will just go and suck down all the Five Senses Coffee? Taken from their site:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment

If you've never been to a BarCamp before, the idea is simple. BarCamp Perth is a free, single day event held at Central Institute of Technology. It's kind of like a conference in that most of the day is filled with talks (both formal and informal) but anyone and everyone is welcome to speak (hence, an unconference). If you have a topic you're passionate about or you just want to help spread the knowledge, you're invited to submit your talk topic (once that part of the site is up) and people attending on the day will get to choose which talks go when. In past years, we've had talks on everything from Ruby on Rails to Hardware Hacking to Second Life. If you have something to contribute or just want to learn, BarCamp Perth is for you. The motto of BarCamp is simple: No spectators, only participants.

creating a bogus / empty file in Linux

A friend emailed me tonight asking how he could create a file on his Linux system of a specific size, but with no real data in it... He could have googled... but. Here's a run down: dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1024 count=1048576 dd - the command if - input file (zero in this case) of - output file bs - byte size count - times So the above is a 1GB file filled with randomness.

Webmin mobile theme

If you administer Linux servers, you might have heard of Webmin. If you haven't, then you should take a look! Well today, Jamie Cameron (Webmin developer) e-mailed me a sneak peek of the Webmin mobile device theme which will be released within the next week or so The add-on is a theme that allows a mobile user to easily administer webmin from anywhere on a device such as an Apple iPhone and is available as an easy RPM update to your existing RPM installed webmin (tar.gz and deb installs also available). While the interface works fairly well it's still far from perfect with most of the module and configuration showing as regular full featured web pages and not "fancied up" by iUI (the framework that the rest of the menu system is based on). Jamie says that more work will be done in the future to further improve the UI. I have no doubt that further integration of iUI or even the webapp.net.free.fr framework will offer even faster and lighter access to your Webmin. Here's a gallery of screen shots: [gallery]

Fedora 9 Linux on a USB stick

Check this out.. Run Fedora 9 (and other LINUX's) right off a USB stick. Plug it in, boot it up, instant mobile desktop, with the liveusb-creator "The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives." I tried it, it works, it's super cool. Mind you I tried it on three machines, only one worked. I guess it depends how nicely your PC's BIOS plays

Tags: fedora, linux, live, usb, liveusb-creator

Fedora 8 Released

Today Fedora 8 is available to the public. I've been trying to find a mirror to download it however it seems everyone has the same idea and most sites are flooded and timing out. The demand must be huge. I'm pulling it down now via torrent. This could take a while! I'll have more information soon. I hope to install it tonight and take a look at whats new or changed. Looks to be some nice improvements!

auto open Transmission

I use transmission to download files sometimes, it's a torrent client. http://transmission.m0k.org It has a neat feature where you can set how much bandwidth the client has during certain hours, like an on peak and off peak. My off-peak quota is 15Gig, not much I know, and isn't nearly used enough. So I figured why not set Transmission to start downloading at 2am when my off-peak quota starts? I added the Transmission app to the crontab to start up at 2am: open terminal, type "crontab -e" this will open vi. Hit "i" to start inserting text and put in: 0 2 * * * /Applications/Transmission.app/Contents/MacOS/Transmission & then hit "esc" then ":wq" to write and quit. The "2" in the above line represents 2am. Dont forget to remove the entry when you do not want transmission to start at 2am! you can do this by opening the file as per the above, but instead of "i" inserting text, just hit "dd" to delete the line, then ":wq" to save and exit. you could probably do this with just about any app (schedule them to open/run as you desire) for more information, do a search for "cron"!

Simple Invoices

Have you ever wondered if there was an appl available, that was free, that would take care of your Invoices? Well, have I got something for you?! http://www.simpleinvoices.org/ Simple Invoices is a web-based mySQL/PHP driven application that allows the user to create, edit, manage electronic invoices. Some features include export to PDF/XLS/DOC, reporting on billers, customers, product sales... and more! I've been using Simple Invoices for some time now, and have started getting more involved in the project. It's rather 'simple' to install, and easy to use. I highly recommend it!

Transmission .70 goes stable

from the transmission site 0.70 Released! Posted by John Clay on 18/04/07 After almost a year without an update, we are pleased to release version 0.70 of Transmission. Note: From 0.70 on, Transmission for Mac OS X requires 10.4 Tiger or newer. 0.70 (2007/04/18) New icon Automatic port mapping (NAT-PMP and UPnP IGD) Peer exchange (PEX) compatible with Azureus and uTorrent Multitracker support Better handling of tracker announce interval Fixes bug where absurdly huge upload/download totals could be sent Automatic tracker scraping Cache connected peers Many miscellaneous bugfixes and small improvements

new hosting

Today I've migrated this web site to a dedicated web server that I've setup in the USA with Superb Hosting. It's expensive to have the server, but hopefully I will have some web clients that will help ease the monthly costs! The server is just an Intel consumer box running Linux (Fedora Core 6) The speed improvement should be excellent. As previously this site was run off a server, at home, on the end of my 1500/256k ADSL link. (nasty) I'm looking forward to further enhancing the machine for even more services soon!

rsync rocks your socks (and your jocks)

Last night I setup a backup scheme for a client, they have two Linux machines, a mail server and an intranet server, with no real backup.... I setup a little 'rsync' script, that uses SSH to copy data from one machine to the other. It's all setup on the one server, it copies data off the remote machine, and also copies data to it. The connection is encrypted and keys were generated for it all to happen automatically. excellent! A cron job runs the script(s) as desired in the wee hours of the morning. I sorta followed this guide, it's excellent, and easy: http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html Oh! and you can setup something like this for your Mac too (OS X has rsync built in, so cool). I'll be setting up an automator workflow soon which will use rsync to backup data to an external hard disk, for another client. More info on this later