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

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.

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

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

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

What a load of crock! I suppose nobody ever accused MS of being ethical (at least without the sarcasm).

Why does this make any sense at all. I mean just look at this process:
Step 1 – Buy 17,000 Classmate PCs with Mandriva Linux preinstalled
Step 2 – See machines working correctly
Step 3 – Have machines shipped
Step 4 – Pay for hardware and software
Step 5 – Install MS Windoze on all PCs (?!&?*?#$!!!!!)

How the hell does any of that work? Is Microsoft just playing dirty wherever it can? Do they just want to subsidise African nations computer needs?

If they want to pay me to use MS Windows, send me a message.

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Mandriva Linux 2008.0 is out and going strong. Keeping that in mind, I have now updated this server to run 2008.0 with very few problems (via urpmi –auto-select). This is a first for me with any Mandriva server. Well done guys!

I’ve also installed the Powerpack on my Toshiba Satellite 2410 laptop with no real issues, but with great new fonts and features (like automount ntfs-3g) all around.

For the last month (and a bit) I’ve been running Mandriva 2007.1 Spring PowerPack on my Toshiba Satellite 2410. To avoid people having to skip to the conclusion, I’m sticking with Mandriva Linux Spring on my laptop permanently!

In the past I’ve only run WinXP as my primary operating system on this laptop (feel free to flame away), and either dual booted to Mandriva, or run a MandrivaOne disc. However, due to certain apps and features not working correctly or stably previously, I haven’t permanently converted. These apps/features include:

• Hibernate to RAM
• Hibernate to Disk
• NTFS-3G on FUSE (writing to NTFS)
• Power Management and CPU Scaling
• OpenOffice 2 (matching my desktop + OpenDocumentFormat etc.)
• Easy wireless management
• Proprietary nVidia driver
• MS fonts

Laptop Specs:

• Toshiba Satellite 2410
• Intel P4-M 1.7GHz
• 784MB DDR RAM
• nVidia 32MB GeForce4 420Go (not 16mb as per my previous reviews)
• D-Link DWL-G680 Wireless 802.11b/g (Turbo and XR) [Atheros PC-Card]

Installation & Configuration

I did a fresh install from the PowerPack DVD with only one unexpected problem. When installing the grub bootloader, it would hang. Using Ctrl+ALt+F1, killing the grub install via console, returning to the installer (Ctrl+Alt+F7) and clicking “retry” fixed the problem and it installed the bootloader fine the second time. Not sure why it happens but it did occur with the previous Mandriva Linux with grub but not with lilo. However grub is now the default for Spring. 1st problem solved.

As I knew that my Toshiba Laptop screen can be funny with the proprietary nVidia driver, I picked the free driver during install. First boot worked great. I particularly liked the new KDE splash screen (image to come). I noticed that both my wireless card and the power management was installed correctly (along with beagle which I removed) and were very easy to configure. The new wireless (or at least updated) system works great.

After configuring the power management I tried out the Hibernate to RAM and disk functions. Hibernate to RAM works well, and even disables and enable my wireless properly. 1st time I ran Hibernate to Disk it worked great, however ever since then it instantly starts up again. I’ll have to work out a fix for that in future.

As Spring comes with Firefox 2 (which I prefer) and OpenOffice2, I didn’t need to worry about upgrading. I don’t really like the Mandriva Firefox theme, so if you change to EVG theme then back to default and restart Firefox you will have the normal theme again.

As usual my laptop has a problem running the proprietary nVidia drivers due to the screen blanking. After scouring the web, nVidia forums and with great help from the Mandriva bugzilla team I found that this thing is common for this range of Toshiba laptops. Thankfully this has been resolved before. It involves setting up a special binary file, but if you need more info check out my bugzilla listing.

Proprietary drivers up and running, I tried out metisse, compiz and beryl on the laptop. Metisse worked great but I’m not sure I’ll need it for my workloads. Compiz and beryl looked great, but really my itty bitty p4-m 1.7 and a 3mb graphics card don’t really cut it. I only saw one problem with compiz/beryl, where the background will go black whilst the current window shows normally. Either resizing the window or flipping to the console and returning seems to fix it temporarily, but I don’t think I’ll try to fix this due to my laptop speed.

As usual I setup my update repositories via easyUrpmi, however I have now moved to using the distrib-coffee mirror as my default.

There is a great setup guide for Mandriva 2007.1 Spring for free users at HowToForge but there are some tips for PowerPack users too. From the tips on page 7, I installed the MS truetype fonts, and hey presto! stuff looks the same as on a windows box. Make sure you add your update repositories before installing the fonts as there are a few prerequisites.

Installed the ntfs-3g package with success, and managed to mount my NTFS formatted external hard drive with no problems. I can’t wait for someone to integrate this with the KDE automount system *hint hint*

Extra Features

Some nice features have been added for this release. Namely very tight virtualisation with Xen, qemu, VirtualBox and VMware Player. I’m yet to have time to play around with these to much yet. The other feature I love was the install script for Google Earth on the menu. Worked great with no messing about. Just one question. Why does the install script stay in the menu after the program has been installed?

Gone Missing

Last time around Mandriva added LinDVD, a proprietary DVD pack from the same guys that make WinDVD. However it isn’t there now. I shall be going back to my old disks to install it, but what about everyone else? Desktop linux users should be able to legally play dvds.

A month on…

After using this as my primary OS (well only OS) on my laptop, I’m happy to keep it this way. Great stability, great apps and excellent configuration with only minor hiccups. I may still try and fix Hibernate to Disk, but it isn’t high on my priority list. Mandriva seems to be heading in the right direction with this release, despite some internal reorganisation. A couple of great releases on the trot, let’s hope they we can make it three.

Creating interest in linux

As a side note I love playing SuperTux and the odd Frozen Bubble. When sitting I’m around at Uni, taking a few moments to relax, I usually whip out SuperTux. It seems this is quite popular and I usually get a small crowd watching over my shoulder, with the odd call out of “can I get that?”. Maybe we should all play a game in public to promote linux!