The Combat Pretzel » Computers

Cheap dedicated hosting!

admin — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:41:55 +0000

I’ve finally found a relatively cheap dedicated webhost, that allows me to evade this stupid VPS bullshit and actually let me do what I want. That host is called Hetzner Online, located in Germany.

If you don’t need mission critical hosting and can accept running your stuff on consumer hardware, this might just be for you. 50€ a month nets me an Athlon X2 5600+ with two gig of RAM and two 400GB SATA drives. My silly three-share VPS with lagged CPU shares, 768 megs and 15GB of disk would have costed me a little more than 40€ once the promo is over. Since I don’t host the New York stock exchange on this box, I don’t need to think twice where I go.

The best thing of all this is that I’m running OpenSolaris 2008.11 and it’s AMP stack on this thing. Granted, OpenSolaris isn’t a supported option over at Hetzner (and likely won’t be for a while), but for a little fee, they’ll burn the ISO onto a CD and let you screw two hours with an IP-KVM.

This blog is now OpenSolaris powered! \o/

What the fuck Firefox?!

tomservo — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:17:58 +0000

So I had my machine idling there, while I was doing some paper work (i.e. bills), noticing that the disks make a short ruckus periodically. Trying to find out what it was, I dtraced my system.

Turns out that Firefox seems to maintain a temporary SQLite database, which holds a copy your browsing history. That database gets purged and then refilled regulary, every 10-15 seconds or so, on my system right now writing out 5MB every time. The reason behind this is apparently data integrity.

The Firefox team seems to expect your filesystem catching fire randomly when you turn around, I’m guessing destroying all its precious SQLite files. Or god knows what. Seriously, the browser nor computer nor disks are doing anything. Yet Firefox is bullshitting me. And it’s not going to be fixed before Firefox 3.1.

What the hell!

Fedora 9 on BrandZ

tomservo — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:02:39 +0000

If you’re in need of Linux emulation for whatever reason under Solaris, you’ve an existing mechanism at hand called BrandZ. The seemingly supported distros however are CentOS 3/4 and 5. Kind of antique. Stuff like Ubuntu or various other distros don’t seem to work. However if you really need an updated userland, try Fedora 9.

You go about following the usual Linux 2.6 brand install procedure, but instead feed this image to the zone installer:

http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/contrib/fedora-9-i386-default.tar.gz (courtesy of OpenVZ)

Logging into the zone console will not work. The zone will get stuck booting. Logging into a virtual terminal however does work (i.e. zlogin -l root zone). From there, create a new regular user and then go about installing all various sorts of things using yum. The image above is a minimal one. Be sure to create /etc/resolv.conf and fill some actual nameservers in there.

Update: Proof, pudding and all that shit…

(Pro-Click Zone)

Building Mono 2.0 on OpenSolaris

tomservo — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:50:01 +0000

I’ve tried to build the source from scratch and hacked the configure file in various ways, nothing helped. I’m not sure what the problem is, it looks like the C# compiler in the Mono Lite package freaking out for some reason. To actually build it properly, you have to have an existing working C# compiler. And the basic precompiled one delivered doesn’t work.

To get a working build, you’ll have to build Mono 1.2.6 first. Put it anywhere but /usr, since you probably want it to stay clean. The build however also has some issues. Turns out that the Mono Lite C# compiler in that version doesn’t like an unlimited stack (the main compiler’s probably also affected). To fix that, issue ulimit -Hs 10240 in your command line (preferably bash, since Mono expects the GNU command chain) which sets the hard limit to 10MB, run make, make install and then make sure the binaries are in the path.

Then retry compiling Mono 2.0. The build should succeed.

I’d recommend recompiling the whole package yet again, but with the Mono 2.0 binaries. Which means compile Mono 1.2.6 and slap it in e.g. /opt/mono126, then compile Mono 2.0 putting it in e.g. /opt/mono2 and then do a final compile with the prefix you want. Consider keeping both previous compiles, in case a future release shows more issues.

Update: Turns out that the Mono 2.0 compiler’s also shitting all over itself about Solaris’ default stack settings. Either manually set ulimit or tweak the mcs/gmcs scripts wherever you’ve installed Mono.

Pidgin configure is fucking stupid!

tomservo — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:14:30 +0000

Seriously, why use autoconf if you need to go hands on anyway? That shit started somewhere with the 2.4.x releases and is fucking retarded and annoying. See this:

checking for GTKSPELL... no
configure: error:
GtkSpell development headers not found.
Use --disable-gtkspell if you do not need it.

Duh? How about you just go about implying that parameter then? Like how it was done in the past? What is that change for good, anyway, apart annoying the shit out of people? It doesn’t just happen with GTKSpell.

Solaris/x86 software you might be interested in…

tomservo — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:14:59 +0000

While we wait for Sun to fill up its IPS repository for OpenSolaris and whether third parties create good repos or not (Blastwave, yach!), here’s a three links to binary packages that might interest you and shouldn’t be missing on any system (I’ve tested them only under Solaris Nevada/OpenSolaris). All links are SVR4 packages:

Transmission 1.21: A decent Gnome based torrent client. Stable.

WINE 1.1.2: No explanations needed. Appears stable. Runs at least the three main apps from Office 2007.

Songbird 0.7: A pretty cool iTunes look-a-like. Requires the appropriate GStreamer modules for the respective file formats.

And if you feel really bored and need to watch deviants at play, or maybe just need a virtual toy world, there’s also a bonus: SecondLife for Solaris.