Blogging, Installations & Blockbuster I just ripped out a repetitious chunk from my last blog. This has happened to me before where I see several paragraphs from my post repeated. Like a whole section was copied and pasted. It's not a big deal really. I only noticed it because I was reading my last post to see what I had mentioned. I'll be careful this time to make sure that doesn't happen. Maybe it's a finicky problem with this editor ... in fire fox ... on linux ... SuSE 9.3 to be exact. It could be anything.

This past week was eventfully ... but sad to say I was not apparently productive. I mean I got tons done in my head. I feel exhausted, and the new week is almost upon me, but I can't say I have a great deal of tangible results to brag about. In my defense we have had some timing issues connecting with other people, and collecting parts.

I finally got the two new servers on a Friday to install. To my dismay they had only 1 network card (they are both firewalls). It's not a problem ... just let Ray know and they'll get me some more. I can continue with the installation with one network card. Wrong again. It appears that both servers are USB only. No PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse. That's alright if you have USB keyboard and mice. I have one USB mouse, and a KVM for two servers which happens to be PS/2. So I phoned Ray Fri eve and toke a drive down to compusmart for some parts. So a single USB to PS/2 adapter is $11.99. I know what you are thinking ... "But they come with every $8 mouse?!?!?!". I need the adapter going in the opposite conversion that the ones that come with a mouse. To top it all off ... they only had 1 in stock. I wasn't about to spend $50 on adapters (I needed 4), and drive all over the city checking other locations for some tiny little adapters that in reality cost about $0.67 to make.

I let Ray know ... he made a call and no dice from Gord either. I decided I was screwed for doing some work last weekend and went to loose my money playing poker. Early last week Ray said he had a USB KVM for me. Well it was a nifty looking toy, too bad it didn't come with any cables! That's all I really needed ... the USB cables. I asked AJ if he had some ... sure we got tons at the office ... "Not the ones that come with mice ... the opposite way". Talked to Andy the tech guy ... no luck. I finally stopped at Computer Rack on the way back downtown. Found double keyboard and mouse into a single USB adapter for 10 bucks each. Sweet! ... I'm in business again. No I can do my installations!

The first Kubuntu installation was finished. Too bad the server wouldn't boot up. :( So I tried on the second server and it worked like a charm. I figured I just messed something up and tried again. Exact same setup and it won't boot. Upon some investigation it is not mounting the /var directory on the RAID device ... which means it can't find any boot information so it just hangs. Lovely! I changed the partitioning to a different order and sizes ... this time the installation hangs in the middle of loading packages. I'm going to try installation on each hard drive separately to see if one of them is a problem. If not ... the it's probably a controller fault, and I'll have to make a service call.

Last weekend I went to rent a new movie from Blockbuster. "The Interpreter" was a guaranteed rental, yet no copies were in so I get a free raincheck. I went back a week later to get my free rental and it's all gone again. The clerk says to me "we never have the new releases in". I though to myself ... maybe you should get some more copies? Looks like I might not be getting a free rental as it expires in a week. Bah ... big corporations! Maybe I can reserve it for some night ... that would take effort though ... which I am not willing to dispense on Blockbuster.  ¶ 1:39:00 AM 0 comments

  Weekend I forgot to mention that this past weekend was thanksgiving in Canada. So happing Thanksgiving everyone. Thoughts were for victims of the Hurricanes, and more recently the eaqrthquakes in Pakistan. We do have a great deal to be thankful for. I was thankful AJ kept me up playing poker until 3:30 A.M. That way I am awake right now writing my blog. ;-)

Peace,  ¶ 4:37:00 AM 0 comments

  Webmail, Innobase & Passion So I have almost wrapped up the installations I was working on last week. They went rather smoothly, and with a few lucky surprises. I had a requirement to setup web mail. _Simple_ web mail. Horde/IMP was overkill. I had invested a great deal of time working with the virtual setup so I was armed with the knowledge of what I had to work with to make my decisions.

I started searching out web mail packages. I won't get into all of the details. I finally settled on Squirrelmail. One of the reasons was simple IMAP configuration of Squirrelmail. Since this virtual mail system was originally running on qmail, it was working with Maildir folders. We had originally thought this would pose a small import task. Thanks to the Postfix developers for being uber smart and adding config options to handle Maildir formats. Yippee!. SO I made the smart decision to just keep all of their data in the same format and support it through postfix. The problem with that is the IMAP support.

IMAP support was not a requirement, and specifically stated to not support IMAP to their clients. Webmail runs through IMAP though. I don't even know of any webmail packages that do not. :S Finding an IMAP server that supports Maildir format proved to be more challenging than I expected. cyrus apparently does not support it, so I settled on the courier packages from the kunbuntu repository. The installation and MySQL configuration was a breeze. I fully tested the IMAP was working before I shut off the public access and just ran it locally to suit their needs. Squirrelmail has a nifty perl config script that will setup the proper configuration for several IMAP packages ... just run the script and pick courier and I'm done. Sweet! This went way smoother than I thought. I actually can't wait to do it again ... I'll be way ahead of the game next time. :D

In recent news Oracle has bought Innobase. You can read about it here : http://www.oracle.com/innodb/index.html. There was some buzz about it on the postgreSQL camp. The big question is what this is going to mean for MySQL. Since MySQL basically relies on the InnoDB storage for cool things (Like ACID compliance) this could mean things are going to change for them once their contract is up within the year. The problem comes down to the non-GPL version of MySQL (read $$$ from commercial licenses). If the InnoDB support (Oracle) becomes too pricey they'll have to drop support for it from the commercial (and most likely the GPL too) version. That's not very good considering dropping that would turn the database into an access comparable toy.

I'm of the mind set that hitching yourself onto someone else's work is not going to help you in the long run (like this case). If you really want to create something good ... then you need to _create_ it. The PG community will never have issues like this. The code is always available. The code is also homegrown and solid. They know how to do it right (IMO). I also believe the _want_ to do it right. The developer community takes pride in creating, and are not there to get to the bottom price line. They are there to make the best product they can. I guess that's what has always bugged me about MySQL ... it was about $$$ not the actual product. Business decisions ... shows why money talks. What is it saying to MySQL now?

That got to me thinking about passion. People I know tend to describe me as passionate. I tend to agree. I'm a 110% or nothing kind of guy. With anything I do I usually live and breathe what it is I am involved with. Tonight I'm listening to Neil Young. I think I have a connection to his music because I find it so passionate. You can actually "feel" what he is feeling. It's not too often you find that in artists anymore. I recently watched a not so recent concert of Neil Young (circa 1970s). It was him in the center of a circular setting with just his guitar, harmonica and a microphone. It was amazing to say the least. I was memorized by the performances. Especially "Old Man" which has always been a favorite of mine. He gave a little explanation of some songs and it was quite intriguing the history behind some of his works. I hope my work shows my passion, and hope my life will tell the tales of my many passions too.
So I have almost wrapped up the installations I was working on last week. They went rather smoothly, and with a few lucky surprises.  ¶ 3:43:00 AM 0 comments

  MySQL, Postfix & Hockey I've spent a great deal of my time working with some new systems. Basically upgrading some systems, which also means moving away from Apache 1.3, and qmail. That's not such a big deal. I just had to dig into a hodge-podge server to figure out how several admins over time had set things up. There were copies upon copies of everything ... everywhere. I can say that I have somewhat of a clue as to what is going on now. Actually the transition is almost complete. A few more things need to get done.

first things first was to install Kubuntu on the new servers (YAY!). The next step was to run through the apache configuration. Not a whole bunch of changes here. Just a better layout of configuration files. Virtual host mapping seems to work. Made some additions for default hosts into the virtual maps, so _everything_ is just virtual. Then I set up the ftp daemon. It's the typical problems. login doesn't work, login doesn't work, login doesn't work. Finally ask for help .... Aaron tries ... login success! Whatever ... FTP working.

Part of getting all this stuff to work is finding all of the data inside the existing MySQL database. First thing of course was to trie and dump the database, and then play with my own copy. that was a no go :

mysqldump: relocation error: /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so.10: symbol errno, versio n GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference

Wow. That's all Aaron and I had to say. So Aaron mentions a suggestion to me ... I tar up the files in the mysql data directory, and untar them on my computer. Seems I now have the database. Apparently MySQL keeps each database file structure separately and the flat file system can simply be moved at random to another location, and MySQL will read new files it finds ... interesting. The move from MySQL 3 to MySQL 4 had no effect either. I was surprised ... pleasantly surprised.

Now for my list of things I do not like about MySQL. "show tables". That's 9 characters more to type than the equivalent '\d' in PostgreSQL. That may seem like nit picking to you, but the amount of time a day I list the tables to highlight and X-paste a table name multiplies into 900+ extra characters I have typed. "show columns from table ", or slightly better "describe ". At best that is 7 extra characters on this often used command for me. Now I'm up to 1600+ extra characters in a day. Alright ... so maybe I exaggerated on the amount of times I do that sort of thing ... but that's what it seems like. I don't like the vague error messages when something goes wrong. I don't like the privileges system. I don't like the user administration (granting privileges to a non-existent user in order to create that user seems wrong to me). At least "CREATE USER" is available in MySQL 5. I don't like the name either. There ... I'm finished dumping all over MySQL. It's not _that_ bad ... I would choose PostgeSQL over MySQL any day and twice on Sunday. I can still get around the DB in a fairly efficient manner though.

I now got to delve into setting up postfix with MySQL support for virtual mail. Seems like a big task if you have never done that sort of thing before. The postfix configuration for setting that up turned into 7 lines in the configurations. 5 lines were directives to a database cf file. The database config files were stupidly simple to write. There are great examples on the interweb to follow. I started playing and tweaking, sending mail from the laptop to the new server as the relay. tailing the mail logs to see what happens. porting from the old qmail Maildir styles is not a problem at all. Cheers to the postfix developers for being cool and supporting qmail style Maildir setups. I need to make sure the paths have a '/' on the end to specify a directory and not a spool file. Instead of modifying the data in the database (and then having to modify a custom application as well), I just modified the select field options in the postfix config. Making use of CONCAT_WS('/', path, 'Maildir/'). I was quite impressed at how powerful this could be. I did my happy dance and hi-fixes were in order. I had a working virtual mail server, and not mail porting needed to be done, as everything can be set up without mods to the current setup.

Postfix aliases are another story. I had to build a new table, and write a PHP script to shift data into a proper format for it to work. Small changes for email aliases are minor though. I'm happy no major changes to the bulk email would have to be done. I'm going to go back and make sure that as little changes to the DB, and custom application are needed, then try the setup again on the second server. Still need to configure MySQL replication, install clamav, and setup rsync for the home directories ... little things ... but I'm feeling good today.

I guess I'm feeling good because I know that hockey is starting tonight. My Flyers are at home hosting the New York Rangers. It's gonna be a good season. Picked up Forsberg, got some monster de-fence, rock em sock em hockey! Double header on TSN tonight. Calgary vs Minnesota, and Edmonton vs Colorado(?). Should be good times.  ¶ 12:09:00 PM 0 comments