I'm currently trialing summer daze on my home server, if performance is not up to scratch I will consider swapping Apache for Lighttpd. So far I have noticed that the performance is not on par with the last place Summer Daze was hosted at and that's one of the reasons I'm trialing it only. I'll have to see if I can tweak any more speed out of it

EDIT: OK after a bit of tweaking (not quite finished yet) I seem to have been able to bring the blog's speed up to scratch and at it's performing very well indeed with a server load of around 0.06 to 0.1 and a max of 248 hits an hour.

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I'm back on the net! The Tiscalli spirits did it all in 7 days. They told me I'd be connected on Monday. I'm yet to receive my "Welcome pack" containing modem and so on, that will probably come on Monday as they said but since I'm using my own modem anyway it seems I can access the net before Monday. My connection has dropped a once though it seems quite stable now so with a bit of luck this will stay like it.

What was it like going without the net for an entire week? Well it wouldn't be the first time I have done it, for example when I go on Holiday I don't have the net however never have I sat at home using my PC and not had the net so this was different. Overall I'd say I felt very restricted, I ended up hacking on LogicFury and playing a few games but even doing that wasn't as good without the net. For example, sometimes I reference the on-line PHP manual (I don't have an offline copy) or I might Google the best way of doing something with PHP and find examples but this was impossible of course. As for gaming, I had to use some old graphics drivers as I had recently reinstalled Windows before my net was cut off but didn't set it up properly, this and not being able to download no-cd cracks and game patches to fix bugs was indeed annoying.

I felt rather disconnected from this huge network that has become a part of my everyday life, my computer seems boring and lifeless without it. I'm glad it's back, hopefully it wont be too long before my now recurring nightmare of waking up and finding the net isn't connected is no longer dreamt

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Today (or so British Telecom tells me) my net connection will be cut off as I am moving to a new, cheaper ISP - Tiscalli. According to Tiscalli I could be waiting an entire 28 days to get my connection back! However they said your usually connected to them within a week of requesting broadband from them.

The package isn't an upgrade in any way, shape or form. It's a 2 MB down 256 Kb up package which is what I have at the moment however as at the moment I'll only be getting 1 MB down even though I pay for two. This is because BT are complete idiots and have not upgraded my local exchange. If I was stuck out in the countryside in rural Britain fair enough but I'm in the Midlands! BT are also the scum responsible for my poor 256 Kb upload speed. BT own all ADSL lines in the UK to the best of my knowledge. They lease lines out to companies but if BT hasn't upgraded my exchange and insist on limiting all of their customers to 256 Kb upload speeds then there is nothing that can be done about it for they are a leading monopoly for ADSL.

On a different topic, my server is up and running 24/7 and has been for over three days now, trouble is it wont be accessible whilst I swap ISP . It currently runs, Apache with PHP, MySQL, Python, Perl on the web server and provides the following services FTP, IRC, Mailman Mailing List, SSH, Postfix/Sendmail (Email) and Webmin (Remote Administration. I also use it to keep an IRC client (irssi) and a Bittorrent client (ctorrent which took around 10 mins to compile on the 275 MHzARM processor lol) open. It's proving to be very useful indeed .

The thought of no web access for a week is scary, the thought of no web access for 28 days is the stuff nightmares are made from.

I'll be back when my connection is, until then, bye!

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Nothing but Linux posts on my blog of late, well here is another to continue the trend. I decided to do a re-install of Windows over the weekend. The reason? Windows is kept on my machine purely for gaming of which I do little. If I could play every game I have on Linux Windows would be deleted from my HD faster than you can type fdisk. However this isn't the case and so I thought I would "tidy up" my Windows installation. My Windows partition has remained untouched for over a year (a first for me as I used to do a fresh install Windows every 3-5 months)! It dated back to a time before I had become enlightened and had realised Linux and so there were lots of uneeded programs on my system that I needed back then but were just clogging up the system if all you want to do is game. So a fresh install was completed.

I was fully aware of the implications of dual booting Linux and Windows and what would happen if I was to do a fresh install of Windows i.e. Windows would conviently "forget" I have Linux installed and not allow me to boot into Linux anymore. No prob I thought, I can find away round that. So I went ahead, Windows was installed and up and running (I use that term loosely with Windows) games and all and once again I begain to hate how restrive the environment Windows provides is. It was time to move back to Linux. I popped in a copy of Damn Small Linux 2.0 on my business card shaped CD that I carry at all times in my wallet (yes every self respecting geek has a linux distro at hand at all times ) and loaded it up into text mode. I could have gone Blackbox GUI but I wasn't planning on staying long.

My planning was wrong, I did stay long, very long indeed and returned on several occasions after getting a few error messages. There was a prob with the mtab, the fstab and GRUB - just my luck!

Here's how I got GRUB and so made Linux usuable on my system again:

Mini HOWTO: GRUB rescue from Windows bootloader

For this HOWTO I'll assume you have a working command line infront of you with basic tools like fdisk, mkdir, mount and chroot available. First things first you need to know what partition is your root Linux partition. Most geeks repeat the contents of fstab in their sleep but just in case you don't know perform an fdisk -l. This should give you a list of all partitions available. If you don't recognise your root partition trial and error is probably your best friend here. For this guide I'll be using /dev/hda1 which you should substitue for your root partition.

Now onto the commands:

# mkdir fs
# mount /dev/hda1 fs
# chroot fs
# grub-install /dev/hda

I could like many guides, finish off here but I hate typing in random commands with no explation of what they do so I'll breify explain them. First we create a new directory for your old filesystem, the root partition to be mounted onto, this directory will "contain" the contents of your root partition after executing the following command. Chroot changes the root directory to fs. Meaning after this command has run you are now working from your old linux root system. So any commands on it are now available to you. We now run grub-install from your old root system and tell it be installed on /dev/hda. That's your first hardrive in the machine.

Pitfalls
grub-install reports df: Could not find mount point or something similar. I had this problem and it was caused by an old mtab. The fix:
# rm /etc/mtab
# touch /etc/mtab

Grub installed but Linux wont boot. This could be down to your partition numbers changing. On my system Windows created two partitions instead of one which changed my partition numbering. Your going to have to edit /etc/fstab and possibly /boot/grub/menu.lst and make updates to the partion number eg /dev/hda5 might be /dev/hda6

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Debian is a one of the greatest Linux distros and has been ported to many platforms. Debian's ARM platform port is responsible for me running Debian on my Zarus PDA and now it's responsible for me running Debian on my NetWinder.

This once outdated, near useles RHL 5.0 box is now running Debian Sarge and it's flexability has increased ten fold! I have now been able to set up an X server on the NetWinder and run Blackbox for a GUI. Running Debian means I no longer have the NetWinders web based admin software available, now I have the more superior Webmin, a web based sever admin tool and ISP Config, a cPanel like web server admin tool.

Setting up Debian on the NetWinder was enlightening, it took around 30 minute's to install and was the first time I had ever had the need to perform a diskless TFTP boot (no CD-ROM drive to pop a disk in here ). Setting up the TFTP server on my main Ubuntu Breezy box was a breeze (no pun intended, honest). The NetWinder uses some odd proprietary BIOS come pre-boot CLI system from which you can induce the diskless boot. That again was pretty straight forward. Infact the hardest part was finding the documentation. I had heard putting Debain on the NetWinder was do-able I just didn't know how on earth one goes about doing it. A few mailing list searches later and I'm on the right track.

Soon I'll have this server running 24/7 however one unanticipated problem is how loud the fan is, it's much louder than my desktop system even though it only has one fan and so certainly wont be stopping in my bedroom which means a cabling job is needed. Either that or I use a much larger and slower RPM external fan with a tube attached to where the old fan used to be. Running it as a headless server is entirely possible but it is nice to have it set up in my room with my 10" LCD screen, mini keyboard and mouse



For now the server is up most of the day at kalsus.alphabox.com but down when I sleep. I hope to sort out a proper home for it over the weekend.

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