Planet Cyprix

As part of an overall upgrade for my systems, I’m moving to a brand new server. It’s my first rackmount server at 1U high and will be going into a colocation centre soonish.

It will be running a variety of applications including:

• Mandriva Linux 2010.0
• Web Serving: Nginx, Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3
• Mail: Postfix, Dovecot, RoundCube
• DNS: PowerDNS, Bind
• Database: MySQL
• Virtual Hosting: VirtualBox

Server Specifications:

• Intel SR1530HSH with S3200SHVL Motherboard. 320w PSU, 3x Hot Swap SATA HDD, 2x Gb Nic
• Intel Q9550 Processor – 4x 2.83ghz, 12mb cache, e0 stepping
• Intel Q9400 Processor – 4x 2.66ghz, 6mb cache, r0 stepping
• 4x 2gb (8gb total) Kingston DDR2 800Mhz Ram
• 2x 1Tb Seagate Hard Drives (in RAID 1)

Update: Unfortunately, the E0 stepping Q9550 is not supported for the bios of the s3200 motherboard, so I’ve had to switch down to the Q9400 with only 6mb cache .

Photos:

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Front

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Rear

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Top

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Inside

With my slow move over to nginx I’ve been finding the odd niggle to solve. Today’s one was the inability for my wordpress installations to use the automatic upgrade facility whilst running on nginx. Instead it kept asking to fall back to ftp for upgrading.

On apache, this can occur when your wordpress directory does not have write permissions for the apache user. But I’d already checked that. So I got thinking…

Since nginx and php fastcgi are separate processes I checked the users they were running under – lo and behold the php-fcgi was running under root!!! Big oops! Solution: change php-fcgi to run as user nginx & group nginx (same as the nginx server under Mandriva). As I currently use the spawn-fcgi program I changed by init.d file to use the user and group options as shown below.

/usr/local/bin/spawn-fcgi -u nginx -g nginx

All fixed

At some stage I’ll post my init.d file for php-fcgi and my nginx configuration files once they become somewhat stable.

Lots going on at the moment. I’m migrating most of mine and my clients websites to nginx from apache in preparation for moving everything to a new server.

First thoughts? Nginx is super fast, reasonably easy to configure (once you figure out the php issues) and saves a heap on memory. Downside? I’ve had the odd niggle with moving old sites across – especially since I’m moving to php 5.3 and MySQL 5.1 at the same time, otherwise all good.

The other major change is the look of this blog. The old K2 theme was becoming an issue to deal with (mainly because I didn’t update it enough) so I’ve now moved to this lovely theme: inove. I’ve also done a fresh wordpress install of 2.8.4 and added pretty links – so anyone linking to the old structure might have the odd issue, but otherwise should be painless. Oh yeah – any images on the older posts (pre Aug 2009) are gone.

Anyway here is a list of upgrades currently underway:

• php 5.2.x to 5.3.0
• mysql 5.0 to mysql-max 5.1
• apache 2.2/mod_php to nginx 0.8.10/php-fcgi
• athlon64 2ghz 1gb ram to athlon64 X2 2ghz 2gb ram
• mandriva 2008.x/2009.x to 2010.0 (Cooker)
• wordpress 2.x.x to 2.8.4
• mediawiki 1.x to 1.15.1
• bind 9 to powerdns 2.9.22
• and a few more that i’ve forgotten about

Whenever you have pesky windows users on your network, your file system on any servers running samba start to gain extra, silly, “Thumbs.db” files.

If you’re like me and hate the things with a vengeance, you can get rid of every single one of them using the linux command line below.

updatedb;for i in `locate Thumbs.db|sed 's/ /\__/g'`;do rm -vf "`echo $i | sed 's/__/\\ /g'`";done;

Update 21 Oct 2009: added for loop with sed commands to safety handle spaces, round brackets and single quotes etc. in the file path

Today I got my DViCO FusionHDTV Pro (dvb-t) card working under mandriva linux in Melbourne, Australia.

I’ve been wanting to do this for years and has actually been the major stopper in Mandriva becoming my primary OS on my desktop (besides my laptop(s), wifes laptop, friends laptops, and all my servers). I always figured I could dual-boot for LAN parties.

Anyway… I did it like this.

Step 1. Install Mandriva 2009.1 Spring Powerpack (64bit)

Step 2. Setup online repositories including PLF mirrors

Step 3. Install dvb-apps and most other dvb utils (run `urpmq dvb- -a` to see them)

Step 4. Install mplayer, smplayer and usual auto installed plf codecs

Step 5. (as per v4l mailing list) Download ‘extract_xc3028.pl’ script, and drivers

Step 6. Extract driver and copied it to `/lib/firmware` (do not use Chris Pascoe’s firmware as it is not req’d – and not working)

Step 7. (following instructions from the ubuntu forums) Run `scandvb /usr/share/dvb-apps/scan/dvb-t/au-Melbourne > channels.conf`

Step 8.  Run `sudo cp channels.conf /etc && cp channels.conf ~/.tzap`

Step 9. Test Setup – run `mplayer dvb://”ABC2″`

Step 10. Due to all Australian HDTV channels using AC3 onlyfor sound we need to set the PIDS correctly for the audio as AC3 is by default 0. If you don’t you won’t get any sound on any of the HD channels.

Step 11. For each channel (ABC, 7, 9, 10 and SBS) run `tzap -c /etc/channels.conf -r “ABC1″` <- replacing “ABC1″ with the channel name. Then in a new console run scandvb -c and save the contents.

Step 12. Convert the AC3 values from hex to decimal. (Hint google: convert ….. to decimal)

Step 13. Edit /etc/channels.conf and add the decimal AC3 values in the file. Replace the zero in …:0:… with the AC3 value.

Step 14. Enjoy.

Ahhh

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Finally the Aerospace Students Assocation (AESA) website has gone live on the web.

Well when I mean “live”, I mean I’ve unblocked the search engines as the site now has sufficient content.

Check it out at www.aerospacestudents.org.

AESA is a student group for all Aerospace & Aviation related students at RMIT University. There will be many updates to the website, especially with current New and the following newletters.

Finally got around to doing the big upgrade to Wordpress 2.5. Only a few minor bugs to fix, mainly with the K2 theme.

Updated to fix security bugs. I really must make sure I keep up with these

Well, I’ve been getting a bit behind, so in an effort to keep up to date I’ve upgraded the Planet Cyprix blog to Wordpress 2.3.2 & theme K2 rc4.