Christmas updates

Long time no updates again. I have put the reminder in my ical, so now updates should really be more often.
Meanwhile, I have been busy with few things and here we go:

  • OpenOffice.org office suite appeared to be VERY much like StarOffice – same code base, help and printing available, etc. Good alternative if you want to stay free and open.
  • Running different online game servers may be fun. In particular Quake III Arena servers with Rocket Arena and/or OSP mods. For those, seeking log analyzer’s for games.log – the only one I managed to force to work was Q3LA (Quake 3 Log Analyzer). My samples are http://games.thunderworx.net/q3osp/ (OSP) and http://games.thunderworx.net/q3ra/ (RA).
  • I spent some time with perl/tk programming. Tk appeared not bad at all for something more advanced than xmessage type of things. Clear, object-oriented, readable code, especially when done for Tk perl module (check out CPAN for more information).
  • Coming to surprises: it was a big one for me to find out that xsnow actually has a manual page and a handful of options. Thanks to certain someone I can now nostalgie about real winter with winter background and xsnow with -notrees and -nosanta options on.
  • It looks like finally one of my old dreams will come true and I will be working during the night time, being additionally a techical support guy during that time. Nice anyway.

That looks like all. Last thing I wanted to mention is that I will be out of the island for the first time in several years – Christmas holidays is a good time to visit my mom and bro in Malta (another small island in the same sea…hehe). I will be out from 24th of December until 3rd of January, so I guess there will be no updates during that period.

Linux, Quake III, and Nvidia

Long time no updates. That is because I wa busy with Quake III ;). Actually, making it run was much easier then I thought it will be. What I did was downloading of NVidia drivers from NVidia site and installing them. For those, running Red Hat-based distributions, drivers are available in rpm format. Everything works fine after changing driver from “nv” to “nvidia” in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (video card: Riva TNT 64 for the record).

MP3 broadcasts

I have spent few hours today trying to implement another crazy idea of mine :) This time I want to have an mp3 broadcast continiously coming out of my home server. I was not sure where to start, so I have played with Icecast, Shoutcast, and Apache::MP3. The latest didn’t work yet because I forgot to add mod_perl to my web server, which I planning to do today/tomorrow. Apache::MP3 looks very nice on their example site, although I am not sure it is quiet what I need. If you are interested, you can find Apache::MP3 at CPAN. And Icecast I beleive is somewhere near NullSoft and WinAmp.
Some documentation on setting up things can be found at LDP and with the help of Google.

Microsoft LDAP

LDAP saga continues… Finally I have found something that Microsoft did actually good. I have found out that ldifde.exe -f myfile.ldf will export the whole Active Directory structure into myfile.ldf file in LDIF file format (human readable). That is extremely usefull when migrating I have also found Exchange-HOWTO an interesting read.

First LDAP encounter

I have started to learn LDAP today. Here is how I did it:

  • Install new Red Hat Linux 7.2 server.
  • During install
    • Specify to authenticate through LDAP which is located at 127.0.0.1
    • I forgot to permit SSH connection during firewall configuration
    • In boot manager configuration, I have specified to use GRUB with which I don’t have any experience yet.

When I did all this, I have found myself in situation where machine refused any connections via secure shell, refused any logins locally, Result:

  1. Unusable machine
  2. Frozen butt (a/c in the server room)
  3. Complete reinstall
  4. Linux LDAP Tutorial