Birthday 2011

Today is my birthday!!!. We celebrated it yesterday because it is my sister-in-law's birthday too (quite a coincidence) and she is going away on holidays.

I'm in a hurry because (among other things) I'm trying my live-server on the target hardware. Bit of a problem. I need to rearrange some network configuration, it's a minor thing.

Let me show you several pictures of some of the presents I got.

One for my car:

And two for my house:

Trying live-server

This afternoon I have tweaked my configuration of live-server and came up with some nice results. It works great on my eee pc. Tomorrow it's gonna face a trial by fire on the real hardware. I'm still carefully preparing its location, cables and the like.

Here is a snapshot of the boot process with my customized splash screen.

And here is a snapshot after boot. Ready to work.

Services enabled: http, ftp and nfs.

live-server route

After configuring my live-server to use a static ip using live-boot option ip= I had a route problem.

Using traceroute I got the message Connect: Network is unreachable

I tried netstat -nr

And then /sbin/route add -net 0.0.0.0 gw 192.168.2.1 eth0

And now it works!!!

live-server

I have made a special wish for my birthday: A network server. I do not have the shadow of a doubt in respect to the OS I'm going to use. The only choice for me is Debian.

You know that many modern servers have their operating systems on a flash memory saving disk space and also making the substitution of the OS a blast in case something breaks badly.

So an awesome idea has crossed my mind this morning. I'm going to build a customized live-system especially suited for my brand new server. It's gonna be a headless server without x-org but with http, ftp and telnet servers (I always use ssh for remote systems, but this is local. telnet will do). This is just an outline, I'm going to build the image but I won't be able to use it until I have the new machine.

The tools I need are provided by the debian-live team. I've got them all already installed (live-manual as well). Here are the basic steps: (Be warned that this is a custom-made live system but I intend to use persistence to save configurations. I do not want to risk completely losing all data after a power outage or an occasional reboot)

1. $ mkdir live-server && cd live-server
2. $ lb config -b usb-hdd --packages "apache2 proftpd-basic telnetd"
3. # lb build 2>&1 | tee binary.log

Update: This produced a binary.img file of 187MB (Excellent size) I copied it on a USB stick of 1GB. The space left is used for persistence.

I tried it on my eee pc just to see if it worked and it did, just fine. I still need to tweak several things. Most of all configs...

Update 2 The new system works fine, I have added some more packages and improved its configuration.

live-gun

UPDATE(10th April,2011): The concert was not bad at all. The band did their best to perform a good show. The only problem was the awful sound quality of the venue. It was hard distinguishing a guitar note from the strangling of a cat. 

This picture was "stolen" from Gun-Official facebook. It is me and my friends in the middle of the crowd!!!

Got the tickets!!!

After so many years listening to their music, next Saturday (April, 9th) I'll finally have the opportunity to see Gun performing live in a concert. I'm so excited about it that I just can't wait for the moment to arrive.

taking on the world...........

www.branchable.com

Awesome discovery!!!

Debian-user mailing list (and irc channel) was often overcrowded. When someone wanted to introduce an "unusual" or "different" topic they sent messages with the header [OT] meaning off-topic. So Debian guys created a new mailing list and also a new irc channel called #debian-offtopic.

Socializing is great, but it is so much the better if people can share experiences or ideas apart from just technical matters. I recently moved to blogger because if you search for information on blog hosts you always hear the same song: Wordpress-Blogger or Blogger-Wordpress. I asked about blog hosting on #debian-offtopic.


One of the guys there wisely advised me to host it myself (the best option, I know) or alternatively give www.branchable.com a try. I did. I liked it at first but I was a bit disappointed because it seemed much too simple. The first day (Wednesday) I created a blog. But on the second day I got a bit more into the site and I suddenly realized how wonderful it was. Or I'd rather say out of this world. Then I created a wiki (=homepage) It's is true, it may look simple, but I can assure you it is as complete as you can imagine. Again: It's awesome!!!

Let me tell you what is there behind branchable (it's a combination of):

-First the powerful ikiwiki
-Second the popular version control system git
-Last but not least these two guys behind the invention. They are nice people ;)


My sites are temporarily here:

chals.branchable.com
chalsattack.branchable.com