Monthly Archives: May 2002

Live !

Posted by on 31May02 Comments Off

Finally replaced the old site with the new blogging version.

Ok, so things may go offline later if I finally get the NetBSD thing sorted out, but the old site which has been languishing for over 3 years has finally been given a make over. It’s also using my modified Apache mod_include.c file, so it’s time to finish up the documentation and see if anyone is actually interested in my alterations. Hopefully I’ll sort out the video pages over this long bank holiday, then I can get back to cataloguing (sp?) the photo album and get a few more public images online.

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Strange uptime records/site downtime

Posted by on 31May02 Comments Off

If you look at the uptime records in the stats section, you might see a few very short runs. There might also be some times when the sites on this system are unavailable.

I’m basically fed up with the 2.0.24 kernel that Cobalt have for the Qube. Yes, it’s an old product, and I don’t expect company support, but it really annoys me that some software simply refuses to run (like Jabber), and other things are, well, odd (pauses in tar unpacking when the CPU load is waaay down). Not being able to get a new glibc is getting to be more of an issue, and I can’t go above the stock perl 5.004 or the system admin suite blows up. Yuk. I also can’t get FreeS/WAN to play nicely, again due to the kernel age, and I’d really like to get IPSec tunneling going.

So, I’m playing with NetBSD. I’ve ignored the boot server setup and the trashing of the existing disc that the FAQ suggests as the easy method, and have been attempting to get a blank drive set up so that the Qube likes it. So far I’ve done it with a 520MB drive, which shows that the system looks good and performs well (ok, the timeout on the never connected second IDE interface is an annoying 2 minute bootup delay, but I can fix that), with me being able to hack up a DNS file so that internal machines get their requests forwarded ok, and a build of bash-2.05 worked without a hitch. I even managed to fetch most of the packages collection until disc space started looking a bit scarce…

I then tried to get a loaned 13GB drive to startup – nothing. Hmph. The setup is more like the original Qube disc than the 520MB one was, and it’s less happy at the firmware startup. I do have a couple more things to try, and I have hopes that they’ll get it all sorted. After that, I’ll try running on NetBSD for a week or so, and if it all goes well I’ll transfer over to my own nearly spare 20GB drive, and keep the old Linux one as a backup, in case anything bad happens to the drive or the O/S load.

Of course, I could wait for 1.6 to be released in a month or so, but if I do that the delivery date will be pushed back until October, I just know it :) I had hoped to run on the 520MB for a little while, but I have over 1.3GB of httpd served files, so that isn’t a very practical solution…

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Faster page loading

Posted by on 31May02 Comments Off

Simply removed the multiple MySQL lookups from every page

If you want to see the virus or attempted spam counters there’s now a link under stats to attacks. This removed for separate MySQL quries, and helps the response time of all the pages, as there really wasn’t a huge need to show this information all of the time.

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Another aborted php session / new mod_include hack

Posted by on 28May02 Comments Off

Tried to get the menu in php again – gave up. Rewrote mod_include.c to sort things out.

My custom mod_include.c now allows for delayed variable expansion within an SSI variable. This basically means that it behaves a little like a #define clause in C, and allows simple macros to be built up – useful for large blocks of text that have a small change right in the middle of it. Without the delayed expansion this would need to be defined as two separate variables and printed out with two <!--#echo commands with the changed text inbetween. Now, one call to the #macro command will take care of everything ! Once the documentation is finished then I’ll see about getting it submitted to Apache properly.

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New scripts, same problem

Posted by on 23May02 Comments Off

Well, I updated Greymatter and fiddled with the config, but I still can’t get the archive page for January 1999 to be built correctly.

I thought it was an issue with the first entry being the only one for the whole month, so I forced an entry in beforehand, but it doesn’t appear that gm likes this: either it dislikes ‘old’ postings being forced by hand, or I’ve mucked up some of its config in doing so, and it’s now all inconsistent internally.

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flastmod

Posted by on 22May02 Comments Off

Finished adding a correctly dynamic last modification entry to each page. Might be time to think about taking this site live at www.minimal.cx

I had just wanted to use the SSI flastmod directive, but that’s no good for the number of files I have in this dynamic site – I couldn’t see any easy way to pass in the file that is being ‘seen’ (ie: the centre bit) as the SSI simply wants a filename. The kludgy way around it for now is to set a private variable and then get the footerfile to pull in a small (one line) PHP script to grab the data that flastmod would.

The boring part was adding the extra line to each of the files that the site has so far… I think that I’ve got the archive section sorted, but it might be that the flastmod is for the main index page rather than each month, but as they might all get updated at the same time, it shouldn’t matter. Must check into that.

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20,000 logs under the sql

Posted by on 21May02 Comments Off

Over 20,000 lines of logs added from the old data on this system. None of the previous web server info is available, but then who wants to see 2,000+ CodeRed hits ?

Most of the data is in – there were over 26,000 entries at one point, but I’ve pulled a lot of the rubbish. I’ll be trimming the stuff in there from time to time anyway, and just keeping some of the more interesting stats. I’ll try to add a counter to each of the camilla stb pages for example, and populate it with the data from here to try and give a feel for the most viewed image.

Been battling with the Radio Times Palm software, and decided it’s all total rubbish – doesn’t trigger any IR input on my TV, there’s advertising on the subscription product (like the screen size can afford that), plus it’s too slow to use and the screen is simply too small. Pity, ‘cos I loved the idea of beating a Philips Pronto with a cheapo Palm :)

Seems like my Dazzle problems might also have an easy solution – provide a PAL signal source to the input before the DV bridge is powered. Have so far had a 100% success rate with this, which make me a lot happier.

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