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Just wanted to thank David Boreham again for the presentation he did on Fedora Directory Server. 15 people (including myself and David) attended the meeting... which is the highest turnout we have had in a very long time... although I believe we easily have the potential for 3 times that number. I *SHOULD* have brought a camera and taken a few pictures but I didn't.

Birth of LDAP

David started off the presentation by explaining that quite a bit of the most recent development work on FDS (aka Red Hat Directory Server) was actually done here in Montana... by David and people who work for him. It was incredibly interesting to have an actual developer give a presentation and David has a long history in the industry and was able to give us a first-hand introduction into the birth of the ITU's X.500 protocol and how it was later scaled down and adapted to work over TPC/IP as LDAP by Tim Howes of the University of Michigan.

David then explained what LDAP was good for and what it wasn't so good for.

History of Fedora Directory Server

Since FDS is the continuation of the product formerly known as Netscape Directory Server and was aquired by Red Hat on June 1, 2005, David went over some of the history of the product and where it stands today.

For the rest of the story, click on the read more link below...

Short and sweet. Just discovered this trick. In KDE (currently using 3.5.4 FC5) if you move your mouse over the kpanel with more than one application running and over the apps or desktop area... you can use the scrolly mouse wheel to cycle through your apps. from all your desktops. An alternate keyboard method is with Alt+Tab/Ctrl+Tab but those will only alternate between apps. in the current desktop.

Friday I decided to finally get caught up with the latest Gaim IM. I'm using FC5 most of the week while at work. I had been using the latest stable 1.5 RPMs. The past couple weeks for me have been a hassle with requests for authorization and tons of spam/bots from foreign lands. For some reason my privacy setting would never stick for ICQ and MSN accounts. Even if I set them for the current session, the spam bots seem to get through still. Who knows!

Found another cool time saver tip. For me I find myself looking for partition mount points. So I usually do:

fdisk /dev/hda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4982.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders

MediaMVPLately, I have had some fun with a Hauppauge MediaMVP 1000. It is a networked device that is able to receive video and audio steams and display them on your TV. It includes a remote control and once configured is very easy to use. What makes this device extra neat, is that it runs Linux with a few options available giving extra features. Be sure to attend this month's BillingsLUG meeting, when I give a demo of the MVP1000.

When it powers on, it actually loads its OS over the network. The fine people behind the MVP Media Center project have a quite nice replacement mini Linux Distro to get more out of the MVP 1000.

MVP Media Center supports a number of extras compared to the stock Haupauge offering. There is support to integrate the MVP to your ReplayTV and/or MythTV systems. MVPMC also supports streaming from everyone's favorite media player VLC in addition to audio streaming from a SlimServer.

For February's meeting, I will do a show and tell of this neat little device and we will go through the steps of setting up MVPMC and a Linux PC as a media server.

I have done this many times following various instructions when installing perl modules but for the most part they all tell you to:

download > extract > cd into extracted dir
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

I remember there was an easier way that went out and fulfilled all dependencies but I could never remember because I just followed the README file. Today I read a post where at least a couple folks gave the same instructions I recalled using:

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install modulename

Much easier!

UPDATE:

Last weekend I finally got around to putting my latest major hardware purchase into production.

This weekend I finally got around to checking out OpenVZ. With lots of prodding from Scott, not to mention lots of help from Scott, I got this thing installed rather quickly. I pretty much followed Scott's latest article Intro to OpenVZ: Part II. I started with installing CentOS 4.4 using the custom minimalist install and updated everything. BTW this machine is an old Dell 2Ghz with 512MB RAM and 40GB drive.

1U Rack MountYou may or may not have noticed but this site was down some since late Sunday evening until right before I wrote this. I'm not exacly sure what happened but I have some sense of it so I thought I'd jot it down here. I also cover the hardware that runs this system as well as a little about the hosting company we are using. If you are interested, read the rest of the story.

status pageThe problem: A webserver with a lot of files that are to be public... and the public is downloading too much, too fast, too often... in what seems to be a malicious fashion... especially since everyone seems to be using multi-threaded download accelerators.

Solution: mod_cband

Read more for a better explanation of the problem and the steps needed to install mod_cband.