Summer day, happy happy happy!

Sunday morning, I wake up at 8 AM after a busy Saturday, and the first thing I see, is a happy birthday message on IM. WTF? It’s not my birthday until December… Then I connect the dots, and I realize it’s the 1’st of June, Child’s day. In Romania, happy birthday stands for happy anniversary also, so “Happy Birthday” to all of you out there, make sure you don’t lose the kid in you. The piece of you that enjoys the sun, that enjoys a good time just sitting around with friends, the innocence of childhood. We all grow up, and become… “grown ups”, but marching through life with just that it just ain’t worthed.

Life provides tests almost at every corner, small tests, big tests, hidden tests and upfront tests. Take them as they come, one at a time, enjoy the test, as much as the result, otherwise, is like taking a gondola in Venice for he first time just to get to the other  side of the canal. Try to see the big picture, try to prioritize. Do you really need that? no, that’s not a good question, the question would be: out of 3 things, A, B and C, which one is the most important? You are doing all of them at the moment, but are you sure you are giving everything for each one of them? is it worth spending all your time on more tasks than you can fulfill, or on tasks that you can barely fulfill?

I have a programming background behind me, and I could have become a programmer. I also have a server administration background, and I became a server administrator. What made me choose that? It was a coffee break at a Microsoft conference a few years ago, when talking to one of the key speakers I asked him condescendingly: “Just now, at this conference, you’re a Microsoft evangelist, you work with Microsoft servers, but what operating system do you have on your gateway/firewall server?” It was a stupid question, and I was 80% sure of the answer, and I was right: he whispered : “Linux of course…” But I’m not trying to make a point here about the pro’s and con’s of operating systems, the ongoing flame war between Microsoft & Linux, I’m just saying that, that little stupid question, helped starting a conversation between the speaker and I, private conversation, in the lobby. He was a good speaker, a good salesman, and a brilliant tech so I enjoyed every moment, but before going back inside, he gave me something to think about. He asked me: “Do you want to be a mediocre programmer in an age filled with programmers? Or do you want to be a brilliant server administrator? Think about it, and try to choose what’s best for you…” At the moment, I’m not a brilliant server administrator, but I’m a good one, and I’m improving daily. Still, from time to time, I start working on different projects, which take me off my “path”. Let’s consider A: Server Administration, B: Social life (family, friends) and C: one of those other projects. In order to do A+B+C one needs to make sacrifices on each one, in order to fulfill them, which means, being average, being mediocre. Try to focus on what’s most important of the three, try to see the big picture. Combining two of them is the ideal situation, but we never live in an ideal situation.

In real life, we always have A, B, C, D, E, F, […], Z. Try to prioritize in order to grow efficiency in order to become a brilliant nurse, a briliant restaurant chef, a brilliant photographer or landscape architect. Make sure you don’t sacrifice too much of what you really want to do, want to become, want to have, in order to achieve something which will only matter for a few seconds after completion.

Today is a happy day, even if for me it marks 8 years since I’ve last seen and hugged my sister…

Ubuntu 8.04 Release Party

[via Adi Roiban]

Grupul pentru Software Liber va organiza o petrecere de lansare a noii versiuni Ubuntu și KiwiLinux.

Locul ales este barul 420 (strada Avram Iancu nr 1 , intersecția cu strada Republicii), începând cu orele 19.00. Vă rugăm să fiți punctuali.

Evenimentul va cuprinde o scurtă prezentare a noilor caracteristici Ubuntu și Kiwi Linux 8.04 şi va continua cu discuţii amicale în jurul unui suc sau a unei beri. Pentru cei prezenți la petrecere am pregătit postere și autocoloante cu Ubuntu și KiwiLinux.

Later Edit: Mi s-a atras atentia ca nu este data in postul asta. Evenimentul va avea loc in data de 7 Mai

Even Later Edit: daca vreti sa va anuntati participarea, va rog sa o facti pe site-ul www.softwareliber.ro

Linux Beginners

For those of you who have basic Linux knowledge, and when I say basic, I mean login, create a directory, list the files etc, that kind of basic, I stumbled upon today a nice tutorial which could take you a few steps further if you are willing to read through it (and you should).

It is actually a shell scripting tutorial, with some power tools like awk or sed and taking a quick glance at it, it looked like it would be worth reading.

Linux Shell Scripting Tutorial v1.05r3 – A Beginner’s handbook

Bâiguieli de duminica seara.

Aproape 2 ani de zile am avut UPC,  si tot auzeam lumea ca se plange in dreapta si in stanga “nu imi merge”, “se deconecteaza”, “nu pot sa downloadez” bla bla. In doi ani de zile, am avut parte de 5 – 6 deconectari, care s-au rezolvat cu o resetare de modem, sau asteptat maxim jumatate de ora sa isi revina. Banda acceptabila, peering frumos etc. Singura chestie care m-a deranjat era ca trebuia sa platesc si abonamentul TV in pachet, dar pana la urma, cu un TV Tuner s-a rezolvat si problema asta. Am fost mai norocos decat altii? Se pare ca da. De cateva zile insa, am inceput sa vad un comportament extrem de aiurea din partea UPC’ului. Pe scurt, merge ca p#%@…

Momentan la birou, mergem pe conexiunea secundara, EuroWeb, care evident se misca total aiurea. Acasa am RDS acum. Fiberlink. Denumirea  frumoasa pentru PPPoE. Deja m-au enervat intr-o zi cu conectivitate extrem de aiurea, dar in rest merge bine. Si e mai ieftin 😉

Un individ a cumparat NightBuyers.eu si a facut o mica clona la NightBuyers.ro.  As merge pana acolo incat sa ii zic retard, dar a facut o miscare inteligenta. Sa ii stea in gat.

Stargate Atlantis a fost iar degeaba saptamana asta. Vreau Jericho! si 24! intre timp, ma delectez cu Jeremiah.

Am fost in Iulius sambata si am gasit o geaca misto la Sprider, dar  era ultima. S-a dus…

Si as mai avea multe de rantuit acum, dar am prea mult de lucru… un cretinel s-a gandit sa exploateze o vulnerabilitate dintr-un cluster de servere, si a reusit sa modifice toate fisierele index.* Am un fisier text de 8.8MB cu locatiile fisierelor afectate… 🙁 auch!

mysql crashes…

So, what do you do when you get this from your logs?

I/O error reading the header from the binary log

Obviously the binary logs are broken, or at least the last one is. They are usually located in /var/logs/mysql/ and you should not start copying over some old logs with the new name because that would just not make it right, so the solution is,

  1. read your logs and see which *.bin file is corrupted
  2. delete it
  3. open /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.index and delete the line with the bin file on it.
  4. Restart mysql

et voila 🙂

Gentoo in distress

Catalin pointed me towards this article on Slashdot.

Apparently, The Gentoo Foundation Charter has been revoked a few weeks ago with no explanation, and Daniel Robbins, the creator of Gentoo is trying to help fix things. Right now it’s all in the hands of the current trustees of the Gentoo Foundation.

Read more on Daniel’s blog: Post1, Post2.

Gentoo is a Linux flavor, and I can safely say it’s my favorite distro. I really hope this will be fixed up somehow, and we will have Gentoo on the list of linux distros for a long time.

I even painted Larry the cow on my little Tux…

TuxTux

Windows based hosting vs Linux based hosting

Lately, Microsoft entered the hosting business with full throttle. The number of Windows servers available on the web for hosting purposes, VPS’s on Microsoft Windows 2003 or DDS’s on MSVS grows quite exponentially.

At this point the end user, the customer does not care much what platform he is hosted on (i.e. Linux or Windows) if he has a simple website, maybe a forum, a blog or something like that because technologies are intertwined: you can get an apache webserver both on windows and linux, and you can get ASP support on Linux. Maybe if he needs some VB applications to run he will definitely need windows based hosting, but that’s about it. He gets FTP to upload files, a control panel (i.e. SWSoft’s Plesk) to manage domains, mail addresses, databases, name servers etc. The main problem here is scalability. Thinking in the future, you need to decide if you are going to expand, and in which direction because you can easily switch from Linux to Windows, but the reverse is not that simple. I would suggest Linux of course, being much more secure, robust and efficient.

Today I had to delete 1 folder on a windows VPS. How much do you think that took? whatever you said, the answer is no! Let’s see:

  • remote desktop to the VPS – 15 seconds
  • locating the folder in question – another 10 – 15 seconds.
  • trying the delete button, checking permissions 1 minute
  • googling for something as trivial as “how to delete a directory with a space in its name” and finding the right solution: 15 minutes. (this is an extreme drawback… Windows problems, are often not well documented)

Add to that stopping the VPS from virtuozzo (vzctl stop VEID), mounting it on the VPS Node (vzctl mount VEID) and going to the mount point ( c:\vz\private\VEID\root\Inetpub\FtpUpload ) and then unmounting (vzctl umount VEID) and restarting the VPS (vzctl start VEID) nand you’ve got yourself a good 25 minutes spent on removing 1 folder:

C:\Inetpub\FtpUpload\ \ÿta18594-ÿ\ÿ-;; &20 @tagged .by; quit %f;;…-ÿ\ÿÿ-ÿÿ\ÿÿ–ÿ\ÿ-;% scanned by %d.-ÿ\ÿÿ-ÿ

My advice? stick to Linux. Why? because Linux is well documented, it has a great community behind, mature, and many many more qualities can go here.

LINA! Open LINA!

lina_logo_only.pngNo no no, it’s not my new girlfriend… It’s a long expected platform for running software with native look and feel on different OS’s…

Their description is quite explanatory:

LINA enables Open Source applications to run on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems with native look and feel. GUI applications running on LINA are indistinguishable from the other applications on the user’s machine because they utilize the native libraries of the underlying operating system. LINA integrates native linux command line applications directly into the DOS, Mac OS X, or UNIX console. The configuration files of Web applications that run on LINA are fully accessible and editable.

It’s quite a nifty thing, and I can’t wait to get home and play with it!!!!

Read more on http://www.openlina.org