Thanks Ben for letting me know that user registrations were broken here, I think it was because I slipped up with migrating the database permissions over to the Xen system.. Should be fixed now!

Update: Spoke too soon – try again tomorrow.. 🙁

The sequence to get a work around (whilst waiting for a response from Ubuntu) was:

1. Try and strip out the I2O subsytem from the initrd created by initramfs and then find it fails to load the dpt_i2o driver at all.
2. Use mkinitrd not mkinitramfs as that has enough sense not to include the I2O subsystem.
3. Find that the machine then crashes after your disks are mounted because hotplug tries to load I2O when it begins during the init scripts.
4. Remove or move somewhere innocuous the /lib/modules/2.6.12-9-686-smp/kernel/drivers/message/i2o directory and reboot.
5. Update the bug report in the hope you won’t have to go through it again!

Finally my machine boots…

Early last week I successfully upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 5.04 to the 5.10RC (Breezy release candidate) via apt-get dist-upgrade, and then on the weekend I had the chance to upgrade my desktop to it as well. Not a problem I thought, the laptop worked fine so the desktop would be easy too! How wrong I was..

I’ve now got an unbootable system because Breezy (even the Live CD!) tries to load both the dpt_i2o and the I2O subsystem at the same time. Now this is a Bad Thing ™ and results in a kernel panic whilst the kernel is loading.

Needless to say I’ve reported this as a bug (17897) but I don’t know how long it will take them to work out what to do about it. In the meantime I’m going to build myself a custom initrd without the troublesome I2O subsystem and see if that helps!

On the plus side my work machine (IDE drives) upgraded with no problems.

I’m working like the proverbial headless chook here shifting all the websites and the email setup on this new Xen box as the test case of www.csamuel.org seems to be working rather well!

James asks “how many actually use Revision Control Systems like SVN or Arch/Bazaar/Bazaar-ng ?“.

Well I’m using Subversion for managing various websites and it works pretty well, I’m happy with it. I’m not doing anything that needs distributed developers or branches, though, so I don’t need any of those features that Arch, et. al or git supplies.

At work we’ve been using the Xen hypervisor with various Linux distros (Centos and CERN’s Scientific Linux at present) for running the multiple gatekeepers that we need with different versions of the Globus Toolkit installed without needing to buy the physical hardware (they’re a bit like webservers, occasional bursts of activity with large periods of inactivity). Our experience is, in short, it rocks! The main hassles have been the necessity to use Redhat derived distros which lack Debians nice debbootstrap install system.

Now Damon (you’re email is over quota, mate!), who worked with me and has now moved to the UK (the two events are not related I hasten to add 🙂 ) spotted a company called Rimu Hosting based in NZ who are offering Xen based virtual machines for you to use with what I consider reasonable pricing (warning, they use US dollars, not NZ, on their site) factoring in complete control over your virtual box.

Having an urgent need to consolidate the various sites Donna and I run plus the fact that our ADSL provider is a Telstra reseller and Telstra have a seriously broken DNS configuration (PTR records with no matching A records, a no-no by RFC 1912) which plays merry hell with our outgoing email we’ve now signed up for a Debian Sarge based Xen system.

So I’ve now moved www.csamuel.org as the first test. It’s reasonably complicated as it’s using Postnuke and Gallery and hence relies on MySQL, but doesn’t need a working email system which will take a little longer to migrate as the anti-spam protection there is quite complicated.

We’ve been more than happy with our other providers, Nick Conein at MIkalnet in Canada for Donna’s site and PHPWebhosting in the US who’ve hosted my site since 2002, but the problems we’ve got at the moment have made this necessary.

Via a Groklaw News Pick,
Stuff.co.nz is reporting that:

In a stroke of irony, Microsoft’s Halo movie will be produced in Wellington by servers running the open-source Linux operating system.

Weta Digital uses more than 1000 dual-processor IBM blade servers running the Fedora version of the Red Hat distribution of the Linux to produce special effects for movies that have so far included Lord of the Rings and King Kong.

Microsoft will receive $US$5 million up front from Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox, plus a cut of ticket sales.

I do so hope that their will be a credit for Linux at the end!

First off, Andrew has got it in one – Linux Weekly News (LWN) is (IMHO) the best Linux publication. I’ve been a subscriber for 3 years or so now, and it’s worth the tiny cost many times over just for their kernel development coverage. But they need subscribers to keep going, and so here is my plea to you who like to use Linux.

SUBSCRIBE – NOW!

Do it now. Do not think. Do it before it is too late.

This is pretty cute, it’s a captive portal for wifi access on the same lines as NoCat but intended for running on embedded Linux systems such as the WRT54G, and it’s called WiFiDog. Ahem. Anyway, their site says:

Existing captive portal solutions were either almost impossible to embed (NoCat, which relies on perl, GnuPG , OpenSSL ), or only designed to display disclaimers with no access control at all (NoCatSplash and others). Wifidog is designed to have optional centralized access control, full bandwidth accounting, node heartbeating and local content specific to each hotspot. It does not rely on a javascript window, so it works with any platform with a web browser, including PDAs and cellphones. It is developed in C to make it easy to include in embedded systems (It has been designed for the Linksys WRT54G, but runs on any recent Linux platform). A typical install only takes 30kb on i386, and a fully functionnal install could be made in under 10 kb if necessary.