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As some of you know, I am a Sony freak. I also have been working on switching from Windows to Linux. The following is how I got Ubuntu working on my Laptops and what works and what doesnt.

Let’s start with my laptops, I have 3 main laptops they are all Sony Vaio’s with the following model numbers:

Ok. I have 3 main laptops I use. I have my Big Guy (Sony Vaio AR290G) slightly modified with 4gig of ram and 2x 200gig SATA drives. I have my travel one (Sony Vaio SZ430N) and my little guy (Sony Vaio UX280P). My goal, since I have been migrating off of windows, was to get a full working copy of Linux on them that would work for me in day to day tasks (plus allow me some leisure time by playing the games I like to play). My second goal was to get as much of the hardware on these laptops functioning properly under linux.

Since we switched from windows to CentOS/Red Hat on our server side, I decided to try Fedora or CentOS as my desktop. Fedora and CentOS installed fine on all of the machines. I used several sources and got wireless working and the camera functioned intermittently. None of the Sony proprietary buttons worked. The nVidia drivers had issues on both the AR and SZ. Oddly enough, I installed Fedora Core 6 on the UX and got almost everything working flawlessly.

Read the complete Post.

We just recently converted most of our webservers to CentOS. I had been running in a Windows 2003 server environment for quite a few years. Mostly because I owned licenses and it was easy to find people to manage it. Anyways, I am an old school command line guy that got sidetracked and am now back on track. ALTHOUGH, I have been so spoiled by a GUI that there are somethings that I still feel comfortable running in a GUI. (I’ll Leave that discussion for another time, this intro is already too long).

Anyways, I wanted to install FreeNX and access a GUI without the system being natively in GUI mode (runlevel 5).  So, here are my steps that I used to install it to my main server running CentOS 4.4 in a similar config to ( The Perfect CentOS setup from HowToForge - I will blog my installation at another time as well )

Ok…  you know I love YUM, so here’s what I did: (commands in bold and italic)
First, I ran yum update to make sure all my packages were current

To install GNOME and X Windows:

yum groupinstall “X Window System” “GNOME Desktop Environment”

Install FreeNX

yum install nx freenx

That’s it on the server side, FreeNX is installed and configured

To get the client working:

Download from your server  client.id_dsa.key  located in /etc/nxserver

Download the client from nomachine - http://www.nomachine.com/download.php

Run the install and set up your client to talk to the machine and check advanced settings or configure. Under the configure dialog and the server section hit Key and import the client.id_dsa.key file you downloaded.  Save and click OK.

Now enter your password and you are good to go…

As some of you know, I have been converting my servers from Windows to Linux. Namely, CentOS. I have been finding a LOT of good information on the web on how to configure my system how I like.

Recently, I have been interested in doing a YouTube like site and wanted to have my users view videos using a built in flash player and upload videos in any format they want (well almosy any).

So, I found clipshare and other scripts that do this, but they all require the following to be installed:

I had diffuclty just installing from downloading the downloads on these sites and found a way to do it using the YUM system built into CentOS. Read the complete Post.

Well, I have to give you a bit of background on me and my beliefs of computers and operating systems. I consider myself a computer person. I don’t ascribe to a particular operating system or computing platform. My experience in computers dates back to 1977 and an IMSAI 8080 running IMDOS and BASIC. From there to various CP/M, Vax, and early SCO Unix. I’ve seen and worked on the gamut of operating systems and hardware. Including proprietary stuff like Cisco IOS. I’ve been through my share of network operating systems from Novell, Unix, early Microsoft Server stuffs. So, I think I am a relic.

Over my career when I was primarily in the tech fields, before my management and lately entrepreneurial phase, I jumped on the Microsoft bandwagon and learned how to maintain large networks with Active Directory and Windows Server. I got complacent and forgot about my roots and love of command line OS’s. I had dabbled with Linux in it’s early days, but as my time between tech and management roles became demanding, I gave up “playing” and stuck with the practical and corporate based applications. I actually got to the point where I got so involved with management that I no longer had any time for anything “fun” in the computing world.

Well, over the past few years being in business for myself, I have had the opportunity to get back to “playing” I have built and configured servers internally running every OS I could get my hands on. I have to say, I missed the fun. I am lucky that I am able to afford a decent co located server or two and several PC’s (about 40ish) at home. (Well, we got up to about 40ish as of 6 months ago… we’ve since sold most and have switched to laptops which we now are at about 10+ current models)

So, I started playing with Linux again. I have played with all the current popular flavors (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, and others) I have decided that I like CentOS best for server stuff and Fedora for my personal stuff. But, man, I must say I am having fun again.

The crazy thing is, that since I went into management about 10 years ago, I lost touch with a lot of friends that were die hard tech people (or most of them just found their career and stuck to a particular path of technology). Anyways, since I was getting into Linux, I decided to find a LUG - Linux User’s Group.

Since we’re moving to the Los Angeles area and I would need to make some friends there, I looked up L.A. based LUGs and found the San Fernando Valley Linux User’s Group ( www.sfvlug.org ). Jens and I took a trip down there last Saturday and finally caught up with them since their regular place got the reservations mixed up.

We met some real cool people, and for the first time in a long time I felt like I was around my own kind for a change. I am thinking of driving down on Monday and meeting up with them again. Might be a regular thing.
Anyways, there was no real point to this post, I was just thinking about it and happened to be on my blog… hehehe

Our servers in Dallas hosted by The Planet have been running now for almost 4 years. Our main server has been running quite well and hosting most of our sites with no issues. I am thinking it’s time to upgrade our servers.

We’ve been looking at one large beefy box running some sort of virtualization to consolidate our servers. In house, here in Vegas, we’ve been testing out Microsoft’s Virtual Server and VMWare Server. Both provide what we are looking for in terms of running what we like as guest operating systems. In terms of host operating systems, VMWare runs on Linux where as Virtual Server does not. Also, remote access capabilities for Virtual Server is slightly better than VMWare’s.

Now, I am a computer person, I do not subscribe to the end all be all belief that one OS is better than another, I believe that there is good reason for some to run Windows Server and for others Linux or Mac OSX. They all have their purpose for various situations. I believe in running the proper tools for the job.

We are a Microsoft partner and for years have done well with Microsoft’s products, but I must say, that almost all of our web apps and services are all PHP/MySQL based. (I took our MS SQL server offline almost 2 years ago) Now, PHP/MySQL sites run best in an Apache/Linux environment. So, we definitely want to have our web servers on Linux in the future. (yes, this site is running on a Windows Server host)

Moving forward, it looks like we’re going to go with Windows 2003 Server host running VMWare server. We will have all of our other servers running in a Virtual Machine. We’ll probably host the MySQL server itself on the Host OS and have the Virtual hosts access it through the network.

The reason we’re going with this decision is that most of our group knows how to work with the Microsoft environment and it will ease the transition to the new machines. This will allow us to get to our new projects faster.

For about 4 years now, I have had a 1.2 terrabyte array running with no issues. It’s comprised of four 400 gig seagate IDE drives and connected to a Promise Tech raid controller.

Welp, about 2 weeks ago drive 2 failed and I went out and got a replacement drive and rebuilt the array. Now, 4 years is a long time for a system to be running, so I started to look at other options.

I had been playing with the Linksys NSLU2 for a while. It’s a neat little device that has a network connector and 2 USB ports and allows you to hook up USB hard drives which you can access over your local network. The one great thing about this device is you can install an accessible linux (based on debian) system on this device to configure it to do all sorts of things. Basically, it’s a mini computer with a fully capable operating system on it.

So, I went out and bought 3 of these NSLU2’s (1 for practical use, 2 for testing). So I hooked up 2 Seagate 750 GB external drives to the main one and configured it to be our file server here in our network.  This has been working out well, the only downside is that the Seagate externals go into sleep mode after 10 mins and it takes like 15 to 30 seconds to bring the drive back online when connecting to the NSLU2. (I will be working on this later)

On the other 2 NSLU2’s (slugs as we have reffered to them) I loaded the “unslug” firmware which gives me access to the Linux OS on the slug and the second I loaded DebianSlug and am beginning to play with Linux on these small devices.

All in all, it’s working out well.  I am also working on upgrading our servers in Dallas to newer faster systems.  I will post more on this as that project nears completion.

Well, we got Windows Vista on release day.

We began working on installing Vista on our arsenal of laptops which now consists of:

Sony UX280P (me)
Sony AR290G (me)
Sony FE790PL (me)

HP DV9230US (Jens)
HP DV8339US (x3 - Dana, Angel, spare)

Toshiba A135 (draylan’s)

We bought the DV9230US and A135 with vista installed so there were no major issues there.

So, I begain working on doing the install on my big machine, the AR290G. At the time I started this project, Sony had not put the vista drivers up on their website. I noticed that the AR300 series was very similar in specs to the AR200 series. I figured they were basically the same machine except the 300 series just had vista. So, I downloaded the drivers for the 300 series and began my upgrade on the AR290G.

Everything went pretty smooth. I had to do some extracting of the drivers or tricking the install program to think it was installing on the appropriate machine. All in all it went well. It took about 4 hours or so of tweaking and two re-installs to get it right, but I got it running with all my regular programs (office 2007, adobe creative suite cs2, EVE-Online, SOE Total access, Firefox, etc)

One ironic thing was, once I got the system all set up, I log into the Sony website and see that they just published the drivers for my laptop. hehe

Jens did a re-install on his laptop and he’s fairly happy with his settings. We’re leaving the girls at XP till we get the actual upgrade DVD’s from HP.

I will try to make time and post a detailed install order and what issues there are etc soon. Silver Streak’s array had a drive failure and I am working on that at the momment.

I am also working on the UX280P and the FE790PL’s upgrades.

I am not normally one to play with beta software. I like things to be released and then see what the final outcome looks like. Now, I have been a fan of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 since the Rollup 2. My biggest downside to that OS is that it will not allow you to be joined to a domain AND have extenders installed. (I have an XBOX360 I purchased just to mess with the extender capabilities.)

When Vista released build 5384 to the public. I decided to give that a try. Figuring that I would be able to be joined to a domain AND have my extenders working properly. (which did work) I did not have long to test that build but switched to 5472 when a friend of mine gave me a copy and touted how it was a bit more stable than 5384.

In a previous post, I mentioned getting the NVTV dual tuner card working in Vista. This is true. In Read the complete Post.

When we first moved into the condo last week, my main server “Big Blue” decided not to come up. Turned out that it was the power supply went bad during the move (not sure how).

So, I took the opportunity to prep for a server re-do. The new server will be named “Silver Streak” because it’s trim is silver.
Here is a comparison of Big Blue and Silver Streak:

The new server will be running Windows Virtual Server 2005 and have all my server based functions running in various virtual windows. I’ll also be setting it up for linux testing etc.

So, what’s to become of Big Blue?

The motherboard is going to Jen’s for now. It’s getting a Asus P5AD2-Premium with 2 gig of ram, eVGA NVTV dual tuner card and a couple 300 gig drives. It’s to become our Media Server.

I will post more details on this project as I get the details worked out.