lspeed.org

I recently decided to use Google Picasa to manage my photos, despite the fact that the linux version is in fact non-native and runs through wine. This is partly due to the lack of better alternatives... both F-Spot and DigiKam have their plus points, and are in some respects better than Picasa, but overall I felt that Picasa is closer to what I'm looking for. Anyway, having got used to it for a while I went ahead and found some extra web-export templates online, and then further customized one of them for my own purposes... resulting in: a "Photos" section on the website! I opted to avoid too many special effects - the simple javascript zooming stuff that you see now is as far as I wanted to go. I'm quite pleased with it.

I also discovered that I was suffering from an obscure bug in OpenBSD, which would quite probably have affected outside access to this website for the past few months. Sorry! Apparently the bug is fixed in 4.5. Here is the entry for it from their changelog: "Fix in pf(4) when using sticky-address and a matching pass rule uses reply-to." For now I've put a workaround in place instead, until such time as I can get my hands on 4.5.

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Well I've just got myself a new car. This is after 1.5 years of not having a car, and more like 3 years of not driving. So I'm getting myself reacquainted with the skill... Anyway my previous car was a Nissan Micra. The new one is a Ford Puma Black Edition. Much nicer. Though it is 8.5 years old. Here's a photo:

Tags: car | puma

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Okay, so I've made the site live again!

It's only taken about 18 months to convert from Windows :) Anyway I no longer have any Windows servers, and it's great.

So you'll notice I've logged in with my own user account this time... I never did get pw-kerberos working (actually, I got it working on a standard gentoo install, but not on hardened), instead I went with SASL. However that's not what I'm using for the website. In fact I've switched all externally accessible services over to using LDAP-backed OTP logins.

Let's see, what else is new?...

How about an overview of my completely overhauled network (server aspects):

• 2 back-end Gentoo servers do the following. Note that much of this is fault-tolerant (all except the last 4 items) with heartbeat as the cluster manager:
  
  • SAN (using DRBD and OCFS2)
  • redundant NFS
  • IMAP (Dovecot)
  • network monitoring (Nagios, Cacti, RANCID)
  • intranet system (MySQL, Apache)
  • identity management services (EJBCA, MIT-KRB5, OpenLDAP, FreeRadius, OTPD, SASL, Ypserv)
  • DNS (bind with ldap DLZ module)
  • DHCP
  • central syslog servers
  • serial console server (conserver, with 8-port serial card)
  • games servers (quake3-osp)
  • media center (MythTV)
  • network backups (Bacula, disk-to-disk-to-tape... with a 24 slot LTO-4 tape library)
• 2 front-end Gentoo servers. Again much of this is fault-tolerant (not the last 2):
  • SMTP (Exim)
  • web servers (Apache)
  • FTP
  • SSH gateway
  • IRC proxy
  • PBX (Asterisk... although I've not really set this up properly yet, it's on my todo list)
• 2 OpenBSD firewalls. Completely (statefully) fault-tolerant using CARP, PFSYNC, SASYNC etc:
  • NAT and firewalling
  • IPSec VPNs
  • OpenVPN
  • routing for DMZ and Wireless LANs
  • transparent web and FTP proxying
• A load of network kit (unfortunately most of these are single points of failure):
  • Extreme Summit 5i (core L3 switch)
  • Cisco 2950G-24
  • Juniper J2320 (border router, servicing dual ADSL lines)
  • cheap Linksys switch
  • Netgear WG302 AP
  • the aforementiond tape library... Dell TL2000 w/LTO-4 SAS drive
  • APC 3kW UPS
  • HP 10636 G2 rack
  • 24-port patch panel and 400m of CAT-6 around the walls of the flat (in trunking)

My desktop PC has remained much the same as it was when I last did a major upgrade in January 2007. Intel QX6700, 4GB RAM, nVidia 8800GTX. However I have recently got a new laptop which I'm really pleased with. It's a Samsung Q210... 12.1 inch 1280x800 screen, Core 2 Duo (P8400), 3GB RAM, 320 GB HDD, nVidia 9200M. It's tiny, quick, runs games and compiz-fusion, has lots of storage, and was relatively cheap.

As always I've still got lots to do (notably this website still resembles the default Joomla install rather too much!), but as you can see I've been busy over the past year and a half considering I've converted from Windows servers with Active Directory and Exchange.

Tags: network | update

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Well I spoke too soon, I can't get pw-kerberos to load

Here's the error, in case someone can spot what's wrong:

lt_dlopenext failed: (/usr/lib64/openldap/openldap/pw-kerberos.so) /usr/lib64/openldap/openldap/pw-kerberos.so: undefined symbol: krb5_verify_init_creds_opt_init

So I'll just continue adding stuff as admin for a while...

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After careful consideration I've decided to avoid hacking the core Joomla code this time around. It required too much effort to maintain. So the site is now pure Joomla, with a couple of additional downloaded components / modules / templates etc.

I'm writing this first blog entry as "admin" since I haven't yet sorted out the authentication system. Need to get LDAP authentication working by compiling OpenLDAP with the pw-kerberos contrib addon first. This has just been added to gentoo's ebuild for the OpenLDAP 2.4.x branch (which I need to be able to do the fun multimaster stuff), so I may get round to this sometime soon...

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Apologies for the lack of updates on here. Many changes are in progress and I suspect this site will remain quiet for the time being. But I'll take this opportunity to provide some updates...

1) I bought a 36U rack on Ebay! It is totally awesome and I can't wait to start using it properly. However that will have to wait for number (2). It is an HP 10636 G2 rack, and virtually as-new. Currently being stored in the kitchen.

2) I hope to be moving to a new flat within the next 2 months. Only 200m away from the current place, but this time I'll be making mortgage rather than rent payments! Anyway, I am not yet entirely certain that the new rack will fit up the stairs to the new place, but fingers crossed that I find a way to get it in!

3) Windows is getting on my nerves and I have serious plans in motion to replace it with linux (Gentoo) almost throughout the network. Central to getting this working is migrating server functionality between the platforms. Currently I have 4 virtual machines running inside the Opteron box, on which I am setting up the core functionality on what will later become the 4 real phyical linux servers. The basic idea is that there will be two front end x86 SMP boxes running services that are accessible from the outside world, and two backend x86_64 SMP boxes running everything else, including a SAN. Having two of everything means I can play with clustering and I intend to do both loadbalancing and high availability for as many of the services as possible. This is obviously a major project and I suspect it will take most of the year to complete :)

So far I have been concentrating on the storage side of things, since most other stuff will depend on that being in place already. The overall design for the SAN is as follows: Use EVMS2 to allow flexible allocation of the underlying disk space, on top of which there will be an active/active DRBD v8 setup on the SAN boxes, with both DRBD nodes exporting the devices as iSCSI targets. All the servers (including the SAN boxes themselves) will then connect to the iSCSI targets on both SAN boxes, and dm-multipath will take care of the failover stuff. CLVM and GFS2 will be used to provide a cluster-aware shared storage filesystem that can then finally be mounted and accessed by all nodes simultaneously. This will all run across multiple bonded gigabit network links to try to minimise the performance impact as much as possible.

4) With all of this to keep me occupied I have neglected gaming somewhat so far this year :( but not completely! STALKER was great fun, and now completed. Hurry up Crytek and release Crysis! 

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The upgrade is finally complete and I'm running 64 bit Vista on my new monster desktop system :) I had some problems getting to grips with the OS to start with and ended up reinstalling 8 times before I had something I was completely happy with. Unfortunately there are still a large number of incompatibilities between the new OS and the programs I had running previously in XP. These are slowly being resolved as new versions of the applications are released which are Vista compatible, and there are workarounds for others, but it will be a while before the machine is back to the same level of functionality that it used to have. Having said that I am pleased to have had a fresh start, as there were a couple of lingering problems in the old install that I had failed to fix which were annoying me. The XP install was over 4 years old, having been installed on 18/12/2002! Actually, one of my servers will very soon surpass that age, with an install date of 03/01/2003.

I haven't done a lot of benchmarking yet (partly because half of the benchmarking apps I have don't work on 64 bit Vista). But some of the graphics benchmarks I tried include:

- 3D Mark 05: New machine gets over 15k at stock speeds, no tweaking. Old system got just over 4k. Laptop gets 610.
- Half-Life 2 video stress test: Averages 207 fps at max details, 1600x1200 resolution (but with FSAA turned off - little point at that resolution). Not sure what the old system used to get but I expect it was about 50 fps at 1024 x 768!
- UT2004: Not a benchmark as such, but when just playing some multiplayer games at 1600x1200 with max details the frame rate is pegged at 100! I really noticed the difference in playability here, it was a lot easier to mow down the bots than it ever had been before.

I did mean to post some photos, but I haven't done so yet. I took loads of them - it's just a matter of getting round to sorting out the best ones and uploading them. I'll do it when I can be bothered!

I guess the most irritating aspect of compatibility problems is the fact that a bunch of hardware components don't work. Most notably my TV tuner card, but also scanner, webcam, wifi card (not that I'd need that though), remote control for sound card, and some bluetooth stuff.

Also two of my other machines were to receive upgrades passed down from this desktop machine, but neither of those work at the moment. In one case I think the PSU is not powerful enough. But I'm not sure about the other. It keeps blue-screening windows and sometimes failing to even reach the stage of running the bootloader. Perhaps it is overheating, as the XP3200+ was always a hot chip and it has now had a serious downgrade in system case which is possibly lacking in airflow. 

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