Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

27Aug/130

Enabling Extended Attribute support in a Thecus N2200-EVO

In a related post to my notes on enabling extended attribute support for the Synology DiskStation DS212j, I've managed to accomplish the same task somewhat more elegantly in the Thecus offering. As compared to the Synology 2-bay unit, the Thecus is about the same size and price and offers similar functionality, with the added benefit of hot-swappable drive bays (though the "hot-swappable" part remains something to be proven to me; let's jet say that they are front-accessible, without screws to remove to extricate the drive caddies from the chassis). Getting EA support was considerably easier than with the Synology, as well.

28Apr/130

A sincere apology to users of my YUM repo mirror

You see, it all started in January, when I decided to do a good deed (I should have known better). I set up a YUM repository mirror for Netlabs.org, as OS/2 now uses RPM and YUM for (some) package management (I have a post in draft on that whole issue). It turns out, however, that for reasons which I shall explain, the xml (and related) files in my mirror weren't getting updated, so while I was doing a great job of adding content, I wasn't updating the repo information, so subscribers had no idea.

So, for all of you out there who have come to rely over the past couple of months on my US mirror of the Netlabs YUM repository, I most humbly apologize for the inconvenience. It's fixed now, though.

21Oct/122

Enabling Extended Attribute support in a Synology DiskStation DS212j

As small NAS devices go, the Synology DiskStation offerings are quite good. On the bang-for-the-buck scale, they rank well near the top, offering a diskless, 2-drive-capacity enclosure for right around $200 street price. I won't go into a litany of features here, and truth be told, Rosenthal & Rosenthal is not a Synology business partner, so I have no great axe to grind insofar as additional sales of these units is concerned. Detailed information on the hardware and software may be found on the net in various places. The focus of this post, however, is on getting support for EAs (extended attributes) on this device.

8Sep/120

Multiple default routes / public gateway IPs under Linux

I recently had the need to configure a server for a client with multiple public IPv4 addresses routing to the internet and the requirement to switch between them at will while browsing (http traffic only).

There are a number of articles available on the net dealing with this type of situation, mainly focused on using iproute2, ToS tagging, and Squid (see references, below). However, I bumped into an issue with openSUSE 12.1 where it would stubbornly refuse to accept certain (otherwise valid) ToS (DSCP) values (see https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=770785 for my bug report). This severely limited the number of possible values I could use, and thus, the number of possible public IP addresses.

8Dec/110

Configuring Squid Proxy on OS/2: Path adjustments

Following onto my post concerning web privacy, I wanted to produce some pointers concerning Squid configuration for web blocking. To do that, of course, I needed a working Squid configuration. Mine was sorely in need of an update. I'd been running 2.6 stable 14(?) for a long time, then upgraded to 3.0 stable 13. I recall that took me some time to get working, but still I suffered repeated crashes under heavy load, so as a result, I did what any other normal user would do: I turned it off.

Well, that's no solution, now is it? It's especially no solution if the goal is to be able to tell other people how to use it!Hit with Ball

2Mar/101

Running remote X sessions against old Linux distros

I had occasion last evening to connect to a Red Hat 5.2 server. No, Not Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, but Red Hat 5.2, as in, before Fedora.

I built the server for a client when 5.2 was the current release of Red Hat, on a Compaq Proliant 1850R server with dual Pentium II's and 512MB(?) RAM in July of 1999. The only hardware replacements on that machine have been a cooling fan (recently) and one of the redundant power supplies (several months ago). Frankly, it was supposed to have been decommissioned quite a while back, but somehow, we just never got around to it, and as it keeps doing what it needs to do, and the need for the single app which it hosts has been dwindling, it just hasn't been bumped up the list.

At the client's location, we have been plagued recently with some rather nasty power outages, prompting us to increase UPS capacity. We currently have two APC 3000VA XL units in the rack, along with a 2200VA unit. The two 3000's have network management cards in them, and the NetWare cluster and W2K3 Citrix server are configured using APC's Network Shutdown software.

Unfortunately, there is nothing currently available from APC which will run on a 2.4 Linux kernel (please someone, correct me if I am wrong in this regard), and when I attempted to build apcupsd on it, I was thwarted by some outdated libraries (and updating libraries on an 11-year-old Linux distro is a very difficult process). As the machine already had APC's PowerChute 4.5.1 for Linux installed on it (2001), I figured I'd just tweak the settings and cable the server to the UPS via serial.

Naturally, I wanted to have a look-see at the xpowerchute GUI.