Archive for October, 2006

Upgrading to Debian

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

After having played around a bit, I know one thing for sure: Suse isn’t made for me. I herefor want to switch distro ASAP on my strato server. I basically followed this ‘tutorial’.

I first booted my virtual server into the rescue operating mode, which I use as a demolition operating mode. After logging in on the virtual server (in repair mode) I entered the following commands:
h961153:/repair # cd /repair/
h961153:/repair # rm -r .gnupg/ [^p]* proc/
h961153:/repair # w-get http://files.armorica.tk/strato/debian-3.1-i386-miniserver.tar.gz
...
h961153:/repair # tar -xzf debian-3.1-i386-miniserver.tar.gz
h961153:/repair # rm debian-3.1-i386-miniserver.tar.gz
h961153:/repair # ls
. .. bin boot dev etc home initrd lib media mnt opt private-backup
proc .rnd root sbin srv sys tmp usr var
h961153:/repair #

As you can see, after extracting the .tar file I downloaded form armorica.tk (Thanks henk), an entire filesystem was created. After rebooting I had to fix a few issues with the RSA fingerprint which wasn’t much of a problem. The package I used has a default password, so that’s a last step I need to do:

dolf@dolf:~$ ssh root@louisiana.hostdelight.com
Password: kb3pI3qD7wP8
h961153:~# passwd
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
h961153:~#

That’s all.

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Alien converter

Friday, October 20th, 2006

I’m regurlary looking for debian packages for sertent software. It happens a lot of times that I do find Fedora packages (.rpm), but not the debian packages (.deb). Today I got sick of that again, and I found a program that is able to convert .rpm to .deb and the other way around, as a first hit! The program is called Alien.

It works pretty simple, you specifiy what package should be transformed to what kind of package (in my case .rpm to .deb). Then Alien extracts it, and re-packages it. And, if wanted, automatically installed.

The package I’m talking about is a bundle of MySQL gui-tools.

So, let’s install this pack of MySQL tools:
root@dolf:/home/dolf/Downloads# w get ftp://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/mysql/Downloads/MySQLGUITools/mysql-gui-tools-5.0r4-suse10-i386.tar.gz
...
root@dolf:/home/dolf/Downloads# alien --to-deb mysql-gui-tools-5.0r4-suse10-i386.tar.gz
mysql-gui-tools-5.0r4-suse10_i386-2_all.deb generated
root@dolf:/home/dolf/Downloads# ls
mysql-gui-tools-5.0r4-suse10_i386-2_all.deb mysql-gui-tools-5.0r4-suse10-i386.tar.gz
root@dolf:/home/dolf/Downloads# dpkg -i mysql-gui-tools-5.0r4-suse10_i386-2_all.deb

At this stage I can’t find anything that even looks like a mysql gui tool. Finally it appears that alien has put the contents of the bundle – which are four seperate packages – in the root. These seperate packages are still .rpm, so I guess I have to convert them each seperately.


root@dolf:/# mv mysql* /home/dolf/Downloads/
root@dolf:/home/dolf/Downloads# alien --to-deb mysql-administrator-5.0r4-1suse10.i586.rpm
...
dpkg-architecture: warning: Couldn't determine gcc system type, falling back to default (native compilation)
dpkg-gencontrol: error: current build architecture amd64 does not appear in package's list (i386)
dh_gencontrol: command returned error code 65280

This is a bit scilly of course, for I have a x86_64 CPU, which runs 64 (native) and 32 (emulated) fine. Now I can build this package myself I guess, but I submitted a feature request, to have Alien do it itself.

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Other activities..

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

Blame me for not keeping you updated :X

I do a lot on web developing (PHP5 and mysql), and that’s what I’ve been doing over the past month and still do. One of my brews is a PHP5 (Object Orientated) script/class that acts as a gateway between a web-application and WHM, which is the administrating module that comes with cPanel.

cPanel does provide a script to do this. The problem however is the way it does. It origines – according the copyright notice – from 2002, and looks like it was programmed in php3. Try to turn on error_reporting for fun, and scroll down for minutes, before getting the actual output (= hopeless). The old (cPanel)script syntax is described here

The intension of my class is that everything between the constructor and destructor is handled over one HTTP connection. Unfortunately the WHM-webserver (which is a derival of apache1.3) doesn’t support the keep-alive http option. No luck so far, however I contacted cPanel, and expect to have this feature enabled soon.

The script below supports the same functionality as the original in exception to a SSL-connection to the WHM-server. The functions IsSuspended and ListSuspend() are a few ones that weren’t available in the script of cPanel. I’m also thinking abut adding a feature to down-/upgrade diskspace and bandwidth limites per account. If you’re interested, let me know…..

(more…)

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