i-am.ws |
Witte Fietsen Plan
Hopefully your Dutch is sufficient to understand the title :). In flower-power Holland – 45 years ago on my birthday – the Provo movement started an initiative in Amsterdam to provide everybody with free bicycles. Just grab one, and leave it when you're at your destination. To distinguish these bikes and prevent them from being stolen, they were painted white. The whole thing didn't work, at least not at the time in that form.
I had to think of that last week, when I came out of the office to grab my blue bike to go back home. Mmmm, not such a good plan. My bike wasn't dark blue anymore, but bright white. A sudden late afternoon snowstorm had turned my trusted piece of commute transportation into a solid piece of ice. Oh well, just a night in the garage fixed that problem.
@ 2010 Apr 17 11:44 AM, entry [ witte_fietsen_plan ] was posted in [ general ]
I-am.WS
All blog entries below this one were written as part of my "blogs.sun.com" weblog. But that blog comes to an end, because around Xmas 2009 I left Oracle/Sun to join Cisco. Similar role, Datacenter Architect for Cisco's new UCS platform, later more about that. As a consequence, I can't add to my old blog anymore and I presume that anyway blogs.sun.com will soon be rolled into one of Oracles blogging sites.
For me, time to figure out another venue. I decided to install my own apache-roller (the same blogging software Sun was using), on a box in my basement running Apache and Tomcat. One of the reasons for going this route was that, couple of years ago, I managed to acquire the domain name "i-am.ws". "WS" being my initials, that seemed pretty appropriate as the new name for a blogging site. The sat image in the header is West Samoa, where these domains originate from.
This not being a "what did we have for dinner" blog, but rather more "food for techies", I have to share here a few of my experiences moving my blog from Sun's IT into my basement. The laptop I'm using, is a "goldie-oldie" PII with 256 MB of RAM. That dates it pretty well and therefore it is running RedHat EL3, nothing fancier, but hey, it's doing the job. Therefore it also has an older MySQL version (3.23.58), the same for glibc, etc.
At first I tried to install latest-greatest Roller 4, which became a disaster, all kinds of dependency conflicts. And that makes sense, on top of a 5 year OS you better build a five year old software stack. However, it can be a little scramble to find all the older sw packages. In this case I "dropped down" to Roller 3.1, picked Java 1.5 SE JDK and Tomcat 5.5. Which combination seems to work pretty well together.
The bigger challenge was that my i-am.ws domain points to another webserver on my LAN, which functions as a proxy to my CMS-Made-Simple, my Myth-Web box and now this Roller instance on Tomcat. Typically I fix the fact that different domains are being served by the same webserver, by creating an Apache HTTPD "Virtual Host" with the following parameters.
ServerName ecliptic.net ServerAlias www.ecliptic.net ServerAdmin webmaster@ecliptic.net DocumentRoot /var/www/html/ecliptic.net
But in this situation, that's not enough. We've to proxy to the tomcat server on the other box. Therefore we need to add a couple of 'ProxyPass' and 'ProxyPassReverse' parameters. The following isn't perfect, but I wanted to have "/" (the root of my domain) point to "/roller/wwwillem" on the Tomcat engine. Which makes things a little trickier.
ServerName i-am.ws ServerAlias www.i-am.ws ServerAdmin webmaster@i-am.ws ProxyPass /roller/roller-ui/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/roller-ui/ ProxyPassReverse /roller/roller-ui/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/roller-ui/ ProxyPass /roller/theme/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/theme/ ProxyPassReverse /roller/theme/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/theme/ ProxyPass /roller/wwwillem/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/wwwillem/ ProxyPassReverse /roller/wwwillem/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/wwwillem/ ProxyPass /wwwillem/ http://192.168.1.23:80/roller/wwwillem/ ProxyPassReverse /wwwillem/ http://192.168.1.23:80/roller/wwwillem/ ProxyPass / http://www.i-am.ws/ ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.1.23:8080/ CustomLog /var/log/httpd/i-am-ws_access.log common ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/i-am-ws_error.log
Finally, the biggest problem is that Roller generates in many spots HTML with the base URL hard baked into the code. So, if the browser finds the Tomcat application with "i-am.ws" or even "i-am.ws/roller/wwwillem" the html page will be created with hard-coded links to http://http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/wwwillem/. These should have been relative links of course and probably Roller 4.0 fixed a lot of that, but after googling this for a long time, it seems that there are still many issues around this. I searched for an Apache module that would scrape the html returned to make the necessary corrections, but such a thing doesn't seem to exist.
Anyway, for me the most important thing is to have my WebLog up and running again. In some future I will probably upgrade the whole thing to some newer platform (likely CentOS 6 when that's out, or Fedora 12), but for now, this is good enough. As usual, it was a good learning experience.
@ 2010 Mar 15 11:41 PM, entry [ i_am_ws ] was posted in [ general ]
Ultra Computer Lab
Time to get this WebLog started. I waited long with initiating this blog, but that doesn't mean I'm "late on the web". My first web-server got fired up in 1995, at which time probably the toughest job was to put your hands on an old PC. Hard to imagine today, where you have to pay to throw away a computer, but at the time all PCs -- even a 386 -- were first generation and still hard to get at.
Anyway, I managed to steal one from somewhere, convinced the network administrator to give me a second static IP, put my first Linux (SlackWare) on the box, followed by the ncsa web-server. There wasn't much else, but it worked and then all the focus was on writing content, of course in raw HTML.
Let's skip forward, it's more than 10 years later. This picture of the lab in my basement is to illustrate what this weblog will be all about. You're looking at a mixture of Solaris X86, RedHat, Xinerama, TheWeatherNetwork, BrandZ, Cobalt Qube/RAQ, etc. That's what keeps me awake at night. :-)
I don't intend to write this blog about my food preferences, vacation travels, home reno's, etc. You can find all of that at www.schaik.com on my own domain, which I was lucky enough to secure in 1998.
On this WebLog, it will be all about hacking Solaris and Linux. A few years ago, when Sun's opinion of Linux was still very divided, I used (like many others within Sun) Linux in stealth mode at home and on my laptop. But my colleagues in the office knew how to find me to solve their "triple-boot" problems. Luckily Solaris and Linux are now treated equally, with for me the funny result that I'm currently using much more Solaris than Linux.
Of course with a good amount of hurdles. And that's the main reason for starting this blog. This will become my way to share my "solutions for problems" with the world. Yesterday, a Friday, it was one of those days to be frustrated about half the world just trying to make problems, while the other half is doing all their best to solve them. Unfortunately, I really beleave that that's the ratio. But this site will for 100% be part of the latter: "solving problems".
Final note: I saw this banner sign (I used this picture "top-of-page" when this blog was still part of blogs.sun.com) during our last vacation into the Mexico heartland. I came it across in the beautiful historic university town of Guanajuato. My Spanish is pretty non-existent, but if I'm right, a papeleria is a shop where you buy your stationary. There isn't much synergy between a stationary shop and this blog, but simply because of the word Unix I thought this a good enough reason to make it my banner. Of course I'm still wondering whether this is Mr. Unix himself or that there's something else going on .....
@ 2006 Apr 08 11:26 PM, entry [ ultra_computer_lab ] was posted in [ general ]
