HYPERAXE

I hope Aphilo won’t mind this..

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Types Of Women Using Computer Terminologies
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HARD-DISK Woman:
She remembers everything, FOREVER.

RAM Woman:
She forgets about you, the moment you turn her off.

WINDOWS Woman:
Everyone knows that she can’t do a thing right, but no one can live without her.

EXCEL Woman:
They say she can do a lot of things but you mostly use her for your four basic needs.

SCREENSAVER Woman:
She is good for nothing but at least she is fun!

INTERNET Woman:
Difficult to access.

SERVER Woman:
Always busy when you need her.

MULTIMEDIA Woman:
She makes horrible things look beautiful.

CD-ROM Woman:
She is always faster and faster.

E-MAIL Woman:
Every ten things she says, eight are nonsense.

VIRUS Woman:
Also known as “WIFE”; when you are not expecting her, she comes, installs herself and uses all your resources. If you try to uninstall her you will lose something, if you don’t try to uninstall her you will lose everything!

I’m having some problems compiling my java codes on Ubuntu using ant because of some local settings conflicts. Ubuntu’s locale is set to UTF-8 as default but some of my java codes needs ISO-8859-1 locale to work.

Well, after a bit of googling around, I finally found how to change it.

The command is as simple as:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

And then I just chose en_US.ISO-8859-1 from the choices of locale settings and also made it the default locale.

Well, that’s it! My code can now be compiled on my Ubuntu Linux box.

For some reasons, I found out that APF and Shorewall firewalls are not working on my VPS. I’m not really sure if my VPS host is running an old version of Virtuozzo (SWSoft claims their current release of Virtuozzo VPS manager supports the needed netfilter modules for APF and Shorewall), or if they really didn’t take time to enable the needed modules to allow running the said firewalls.

Anyway, I just wrote my own iptables firewall script to somehow implement if not a completely secure iptables based firewall, at least my VPS would have some degree of protection from the bad guys of the net.

I had been working a lot with RedHat distros before, starting from RedHat 5.0 up to RedHat 9 but a few years ago I tried experimenting with Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian just to get a grip of other available Linux distros. I must say that I really enjoyed it especially with the new things I learned. IMHO, if you are familiar with a Linux distro, you won’t really have hard time with other distros since more or less the commands, and file/directories setup are the same. Unix systems such as Solaris are also easy to learn when you have some amount of Linux background. The only hardships I had with Solaris systems are compiling things that are originally designed for Linux systems. It took me quite some time to make some patches, but nevertheless was able to kick it off with Sun’s popular OS.

Just recently, I was able to stumble upon CentOS during my search for a Linux distro for an enterprise environment. To make the long story short, I read a lot of good things about CentOS, so I decided to use it with my VPS account. My first impression with the said OS is that it seemed to be very conservative with the initial services and processes it runs right after installation. I’m just not sure if this is a custom install of my VPS provider or if it is really what it is when you install it yourself. I have a feeling though that it’s a custom install.

First thing I did when I got my hands with my new VPS account is update all the packages/software installed with my CentOS using yum. Sad to say, I experienced a couple of problems while updating my CentOS.

First Error:
Downloading needed headers
Resolving dependencies
….Unable to satisfy dependencies
Package glibc-dummy-centos-3 needs glibc-common = 2.3.2-95.30, this is not available.

Well, since the glibc-dummy-centos-3 package is causing me problems, and I don’t think it’s needed anyway, I executed the following commands to solve this problem:

yum erase glibc-dummy-centos-3

I thought everything would be ok now, but then I encountered another problem:

Second Error:
warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 025e513b
Error: Could not find the GPG Key necessary to validate pkg /var/cache/yum/update/packages/somepackage.i386.rpm
Error: You may also check that you have the correct GPG keys installed

It’s quite obvious that this is a GPG key error wherein it seems like that the GPG key isn’t present or a key trust isn’t implemented. So here’s what I did to solve the problem:

rpm --import /usr/share/doc/centos-release-3/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-3

Well, that’s it. “yum update” worked after the 2 solutions I did and I’m now running with an updated CentOS.

I finally decided to upgrade my hosting account from a reseller account to a VPS (Virtual Private Server). That’s the reason why I haven’t posted here for quite some time. It took me quite some time to do a bit of research on the VPS offerings around that would fit in to the sites I host and most importantly my budget.

As a Linux/Unix administrator and a software developer, I just felt like I am so helpless without having full root access to the server hosting my sites. It’s not that my previous reseller host Gazzin wasn’t great, actually it’s support and server uptime are really up to most people’s expectations so I would really recommend them. I had a few glitches with Apache/Tomcat modules with them a few times, but they were able to fix it quickly. I just needed more hands-on control to a server so I decided to look for a suitable VPS for me.

So far so good with my new VPS host Tektonic. I just got their unmanaged plan UM1 for $15/mo since I think I am capable enough to manage my own servers and won’t be needing that much help from their support team. As long as I am the super-user (root), I guess I’m good with it. I just hope Tektonik would be a good host for me.