I was looking for a solution to a storage server that contains a single HDD using LVM and served over Samba. I wanted the system to run from a USB stick (The box that housed it could only hold a single disk). This led me to a few places, one of them was of course openfiler. This sounded great but thought it slightly overkill for my needs. I looked around for a mini distro and after hitting all the usual suspects, Puppy, DSL etc, I finally stumbled onto a distro that impressed me and made me go… ooh, this is cool!

Introducing Slitaz, A tiny distribution (40mb) that fits in the palm of your hand. (Okay, all distros do when on a USB stick). But this is just pure joy. You can install it to a HDD, run it Live, install it to a USB stick or even PXE boot the thing.
That’s not all;

• The USB version runs entirely in RAM. This means you protect the life span of your memory card for an extremely long time.
• It allows software upgrades in place which means you get security patches when needed.
• It has a growing repository of applications available.

So I ran into Vagrant over the weekend. Crazy system for creating virtual machines on the fly using VboxHeadless. The beauty of this system is that it’s all done using a single command line tool and machine pre-installs called a “box”. Basically, this is how it went down on my Arch desktop.

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yaourt -S vagrant

So I found myself running into Octopress over the last weekend and as much as I am normally a big PHP fanboy. I was drawn to the idea of what it does and how it works. It feels similar to the last website I ran which stored all the content in flat files and parsed them (textile) to the view. Octopress seems WAY more polished than I could ever create and feels so much nicer to use. All the files are stored on my own local desktop machine and are deployed using Rsync! How much better does it get. I create a post/page, populate it with content, then rsync it into place on the live server.

So, without further ado, here is the procedure used to get it up and running on Archlinux (Desktop) and Archlinux (Server).

This script will do exactly what it says, it will backup a directory to a tape, it checks for a tape and emails you if you haven’t provided one.
It emails every 60 minutes. You can adjust that simply by changing the SLEEP_TIMER value listed below.

Background

Recently I noticed that on installing Ubuntu 8.04 that the iso module was overriding the standard dpt_i2o which would allow access to my DAT drive.
The i2o module produces /dev/i2o/hdx devices.
This all sounds normal to some people but hdx sounds PATA to me and of course, caused the DAT drive to not show up.
Well, here are the instructions to get it working traditionally again.

Introduction

Setting the sipura up to act as a PSTN→VOIP/VOIP→PSTN gateway is actually quite trivial.

This works fine on a 3000 and should also work fine on a 3102.
This is biased towards an AU (Autralian) setup, apologise to others trying to get this working overseas. Most of the configuration should be fine except for the dial tones and disconnect tones.

Freeswitch is a software based SIP server designed for easy use. It is similar to Asterisk. It uses a pure XML based configuration but also allows for RPC calls to a remote server to produce call routing in real-time. I put this document together in order to allow myself to remember how to get it running on Ubuntu 8.04. It is obviously out of date with the introduction to 10.04(LTS) but still works quite well with some minor tweaks.

• http://960.gs

Interesting approach to CSS. I’ll test this out.

Okay, final note, works well if you stick to the exact specifications. Don’t deviate, it starts to get messy.

People suck!! Thats the bottom line, no lies, no beating around the bush.

I have concluded this based on a number of different concepts. My list goes as follows.