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Some in-flight recordings
by lunarg on August 27th 2007, at 18:00

Some in-flight recordings, taken when I was passenger on my orientation flight.

The footage was take with my PDA cam, so it's not very high resolution. Format is MPEG-4 with 3GPP subformat, but normally any decent media player will be able to play it back (I know that at least mplayer with AMR audio codec can).

 
Open house at my glider club
by lunarg on August 25th 2007, at 23:31

Next weekend - sat 25th and sun 26th Aug - you will be able to visit the airport of Kiewit, Hasselt for the open house of my glider club Albatros. You will be able to see what gliding is actually all about: visit the airport, see the gliders, and even fly with one of our skilled pilots: an event well worth visiting...

For more information, visit their site http://www.zweefvliegen-hasselt.be/ (website in Dutch).

 
Problems with app-arch/rpm-4.4.6-r3 (Gentoo)
by lunarg on August 23rd 2007, at 21:09
Had a bit of a problem with re-emerging app-arch/rpm-4.4.6-r3 after an update of libexpat: the emerge failed with a whole bunch of compiler messages.
After a quick search on Gentoo Forums, I found a post about someone who has had the same problem, and was able to solve it.

About halfway the merge, the compile failed. At the beginning of a long list, I found these error messages:

Quote
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I. -I.. -I/usr/include/beecrypt -I../lua/include -I../lua/local -I../misc -march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fPIC -DPIC -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_REENTRANT -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wno-char-subscripts -MT rpmdav.lo -MD   ...
 
nVIDIA in Gentoo
by lunarg on August 23rd 2007, at 20:58
Information about nvidia in Gentoo can be found here.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml

It goes more in detail about which driver versions are suitable for which nvidia cards; quite handy, since they kicked out nvidia-legacy-drivers.

If you don't want to read the article, here's the short story about the driver version:

Geforce FX, 6, 7 and 8: use the newest driver (100.xx and up)

Geforce 3 and 4: max 96.xx

TNT, TNT2, Geforce and Geforce 2: max 71.xx

In order to properly install the correct version, it is recommended to mask the packages like so:

Add the following to /etc/portage/package.mask:

>=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9700

Add the following to /etc/portage/pa  ...
 
Solaris ZFS vs. Red Hat ext3
by lunarg on August 20th 2007, at 22:12
Sun has released benchmark reports about Solaris' ZFS vs. Red Hat ext3:

Download the benchmark report here.

Sun claims for ZFS to be a revolutionary file system, and proves it by their well-documented, and objective (but not really) benchmark report, found at the link above.

ZFS has pretty much overall gain, when compared to ext3, which was to be expected.Of course, what Sun conveniently did not mention, was the alternative of filesystems on RH (or any other linux for that matter).
Are we really impressed about ZFS outperforming ext3? I for one am not, and most sysadmins know that ext3 is not the most performant filesystem in existence. If Sun really wants to show off, they would've taken  ...
 
Tips and tricks using TAR
by lunarg on August 17th 2007, at 15:20
This little article contains some useful tips and tricks about using tar.

When your starting point for the tar is situated at /, you may already have noticed the warning output from it:

Quote
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

In case of an automated backup, where the tar is executed using cron, this warning quickly becomes annoying: most systems mail the output of a cron job to a specified email address (and in any normal scenario, this is configured properly to know whether a backup succeeds or fails). If each time you get a mail with only this warning (the rest of the backup was succesfully completed), one might actually lean towards suffering from a nervous breakdown (if only  ...
 
The Aviator
by lunarg on August 15th 2007, at 18:13

Time for a new experience, and a new hobby in my life.
Thanks to Bart (aka: my boss), who took me and a collegue of mine for a figurative spin around the block: in the form of gliding...

Next thing I know, I was signing myself up at Albatros Zweefvliegclub (note: website in dutch) at Hasselt (Kiewit), and already have had two lessons.

Those that care may keep their fingers crossed each time I'm in the air (usually on saturdays), and pray that I don't drill the glider down into the ground... ;-)

 
DSPAM Performance Tuning
by lunarg on August 8th 2007, at 13:15

In absence of a decent article, here's a good resource page for performance tuning of DSPAM:

http://dspamwiki.expass.de/Performance_Tuning

 
Automatic system reboot
by lunarg on August 2nd 2007, at 15:55
If you ever had the need to automatically reboot your system (whether it's a workstation or a server), knows that this is not a very simple thing to do. The shutdown command of Windows is often limited (e.g. it can't be used when nobody is logged on, or when the system is locked), and other applications are often too complex, or not free, or may even contain spyware and other ill-made wares. Windows Sysinternals has a solution.

The application is called PsShutdown, and is downloadable for free:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/psshutdown.mspx

PsShutdown is quite similar to "regular" shutdown - the former accepts the same parameters as the latter, but has various add  ...
 
HP Insight Manager Agents for VMware ESX Server
by lunarg on August 2nd 2007, at 11:55

The HP Agents for VMware ESX can be downloaded here:

http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/24882.html

 
VMware, IBM Director, and ServeRAID Manager
by lunarg on August 1st 2007, at 14:07

A document about the installation of the IBM Director and ServeRAID manager in VMware ESX 3 can be found here:

http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP101047.

Should be useful to anyone who cares... If I ever get the chance to try it out myself (which should be fairly soon), it would probably be added (after rewriting, of course).

 
Manual configuration of LVM
by lunarg on July 29th 2007, at 15:18
An LVM structure is build as follows:At the bottom is the PV (Physical Volume), which is basically just a partition (logical or not). LVM markers need to be placed on it for LVM to see it as a usable PV.

Before actual volumes can be created, a VG (Volume Group) has to be created. A group is the second lowest structure. Only one VGs can be created on per PV, but a single VG can span multiple PVs, which makes VG a very neat thing.

The final step (before the filesystem) is the LV (Logical Volume). This is the thing that will actual hold the filesystem and data. So when mkfs-ing, it will be done on this. Several LVs can occupy one VG, but unlike VG, an LV can not span VGs (so if you were to me  ...
 
About linux filesystems
by lunarg on July 28th 2007, at 23:02


Has no journalling, so preferrably only used for CF and USB sticks, or for very small file systems where journalling makes things worse than better.

No indexing, so don't use for many files.

Preferred choice for external storage, because virtually all systems can read ext2/ext3 (including Windows with proper software).

Has journalling. Is perfect for all-round (server) systems, in particular root file systems and such. If there are many small files, and many files in one directory, this one is not the preferred choice because there's no specific indexing method (or none that I know of).

Has full resize support, so can be used for LVMs.

Is robust: has proven its worth.

Disaster recove  ...
 
Linux Desktop Adoption: Hitting a Brick Wall?
by lunarg on July 25th 2007, at 00:28

Found this article to be so true...

http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/18417.

 
Client-only MythTV
by lunarg on July 24th 2007, at 23:38
In light of my media guide (which is still under heavy development), I did a bit of experimenting with MythTV.
The result of my experiment is pretty nifty: I now have the ability to watch TV on my laptop (without a TV tuner), as long as I have a connection to my media PC (where the tuner is). Want to know more? Read on then...

As you know (or perhaps not yet), MythTV consists of two parts: a backend server (which does all the work: managing records, accessing hardware and so on), and a frontend client (basically controls the backend server, look up recordings, watch actual TV, etc.).
These two parts communicates with each other using the IP stack. While (according to the Gentoo ebuild maint  ...
 
Brother moved out... (part 3)
by lunarg on July 22nd 2007, at 18:20

The move is as good as completed. I still have to clean up several stuff and such, and there are still some things that have to be moved out (like my father's encyclopedia).

The moving chapter is pretty much finished, well, accept the clean up of course. I'll post a picture as soon as I get there.

 
The Simple Guide to a Media PC
by lunarg on July 13th 2007, at 18:10
Because of my move, I had need of a media PC system, which allowed me to watch TV, record from TV, watch DVDs, listen to music and more. Buying a pc with Windows Media Center was not an option: linux has very wonderful applications and utilities to build such a sytem. For hardware, I had an old pc which I used as a server, but because of the wonderful capabilities of VMware, I decided to convert the machine to a so-called Media PC.

To contribute my efforts to the community, I decided to create some sort of a guide. It is not a real how-to, but rather the steps I took to get things running, along with descriptions and solutions to caveats and problems I encountered.
The guide can be found i  ...
 
Brother moved out... (part 2)
by lunarg on July 13th 2007, at 17:35

Some more intermediate shots of my own move...

More photos will be found in the gallery (if it ever gets finished, that is).

 
Brother moved out...
by lunarg on July 2nd 2007, at 21:14

My brother Kurt moved out this weekend. His house is finally finished, or at least, just up to the point it is liveable.
Since we shared a room, you can believe I'm happy to finally have the Kingdom for myself. The reconstruction (so to speak) has already begun...

Attached are the very first photo's, in the very early stage of the reconstruction.
This part pretty much shows my soon-to-be-my bed. Most of the old cupboards and closets have already been thrown out; you can see the markings on the walls and such.

 
Sprung a leak...
by lunarg on July 2nd 2007, at 21:02
Well, isn't this great... Thought I had a quiet weekend (well, relatively quiet, read the next post), with a bit of gaming and such. But apparently, my oh-so-wonderful water-cooled video card thought otherwise.

Twas Friday afternoon: I booted up my pc. Although it was a bit more silent than usually, I discarded it as being the bit cold weather of these days.
Thought it would be neat to do a bit of retro-gaming, and fired up the old Half-Life 1...

About two minutes in the game, alarms and whistles and popups went off, and as the message your card is too hot appeared on the screen, I distinctively shouted out: WTF!
I quickly cranked up the ATI console, and saw an astonashing 113 degrees C !   ...
 
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