Megalinux

Issue:

“kernel: cdrom: open failed” errors noticed in /var/log/messages

Solution:

Edit /etc/hal/hald.conf and change /haldconfig/storage_media_check to false.

GUI Installation

DO NOT use the GUI installation method. It does not work. It will make you feel really bad for buying this laptop. Worry not. Use the text based installation. Once the installation is complete, it will come up with the GUI with restricted resolution.

Make sure you are connected to the LAN (and of course, you should be connected to the net). (Wifi does not work at this point). It will prompt you to install/use the restricted drivers for nVidia. Say Yes ! It will install the drivers. Reboot. You should have a proper display/resolution now. (It will prompt you to install the “drivers” for broadcom wireless. Do not proceed. They don’t work and you won’t need them).

Networking

In order to use the Broadcom Wireless card in HP DV2610US (and I think it also works on the recent AMD/Nvidia based laptops), you need to do the following:

1. Disable the restricted drivers. You dont need them. The only way it all works is with ndiswrapper
2. Install ndiswrapper (apt-get install ndiswrapper-common or ndiswrapper)
3. Disable any Competing Drivers
   Ubuntu has a kernel driver for this device that is called bcm43xx. In order to use ndiswrapper you must put the bcm43xx in the black list file.

   echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
   

   The blacklisted module will not be loaded on reboot from now on.

4. Download the “windows” driver from HP support

   user@ubuntu:~ $ sudo wget ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp33001-33500/sp33008.exe
   

   If the above driver does not work, try

   wget ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34152.exe
   

5. Install Cabextract. Cabextract will be used to “extract” the windows drivers from the exe file.

   user@ubuntu:~ $ sudo apt-get update
   user@ubuntu:~ $ sudo apt-get install cabextract unzip
   user@ubuntu:~ $ cabextract sp33008.exe
   

6. Install the drivers:

   user@ubuntu:~$ sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
   

   You should notice something like this (and it is normal)

   installing bcmwl5 ...
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
   

7. We can list the drivers, to make sure we have it installed properly

   user@ubuntu:~$ ndiswrapper -l
   installed drivers:
   bcmwl5          driver installed, hardware (14E4:4324) present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)
   

8. Bring up the driver:

   user@ubuntu:~$ sudo depmod -a
   user@ubuntu:~$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
   

9. This should bring up the driver. Reboot. Once you are back in the GUI mode, you should see that Wifi is up and you are shown the nearby networks

I run rdate every night to sync the clock and recently, it kept failing. I tested it manually, and found that when I ran “rdate -p” it kept outputting “Alarm Clock”. I had to update rdate from source (http://freshmeat.net/redir/rdate/8862/url_tgz/rdate-1.4.tar.gz) and it works fine now. (and this was on RedHat 9)

There are several third-party apt and yum repositories for Fedora that provide additional software and some provide support for playing DVDs and MP3 files. Some of these are just the mirrors of Official Fedora Core 3 project site.

Let us configure 3 of such mirrors: FreshRPMS, livna and atrpms.

Since we use package verification using GPG (default setup for Yum), we need to import the GPG keys of the respective repositories. We can do that by,

#> rpm --import http://freshrpms.net/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.txt
#> rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY-x86_64
#> rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY-i386
#> rpm --import http://atrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms

Now, we need to setup the repositories for yum to download from. The repo configuration files are located in /etc/yum.repos.d.

FreshRPMS

create /etc/yum.repos.d/freshrpms.repo, with the following entries:

[freshrpms]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - freshrpms
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearch/freshrpms
gpgcheck=1

Livna

create /etc/yum.repos.d/livna.repo, with the following entries:

[livna-stable]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.stable
gpgcheck=1

[livna-unstable]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (unstable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.unstable
gpgcheck=1

[livna-testing]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (testing)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.testing
gpgcheck=1

ATRPMS

create /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo, with the following entries:

[at-stable]
name=ATrpms for Fedora Core $releasever stable
baseurl=http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-stable

[at-good]
name=ATrpms for Fedora Core $releasever good
baseurl=http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-good

[at-testing]
name=ATrpms for Fedora Core $releasever testing
baseurl=http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-testing

[at-bleeding]
name=ATrpms for Fedora Core $releasever bleeding
baseurl=http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-bleeding

Now that the entries are done, you can use yum to install/upgrade packages.

While compiling ht://dig (htdig) on RedHat 9, I got the following Error:

configure: error: To compile ht://Dig, you will need a C++ library.
Try installing libstdc++

The solution would be to run “./configure” like this:

CXXFLAGS=-Wno-deprecated CPPFLAGS=-Wno-deprecated ./configure <your params>

This is for installing htdig versions prior to 3.2.0b5, to work with GCC 3.2

Configuration:
MRTG ver. 2.97
Net-SNMP ver. 4.2.6
OS : RedHat Linux 7.3

This doc should help you with configuring a RedHat Linux box for monitoring system parameters (local/remote), using Net-SNMP and MRTG.

About MRTG and Net-SNMP

MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher)
The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. MRTG generates HTML pages containing graphical images which provide a LIVE visual representation of this traffic.
Check http://www.ee.ethz.ch/stats/mrtg/ for an example.
MRTG is based on Perl and C and works under UNIX and Windows NT.
MRTG is being successfully used on many sites around the net

Net-SNMP

Net-SNMP is a collection of various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol including:

* An extensible agent
* An SNMP library
* tools to request or set information from SNMP agents
* tools to generate and handle SNMP traps
* a version of the unix ‘netstat’ command using SNMP
* a graphical Perl/Tk/SNMP based mib browser

Read more…

To manage and process logs of multiple webservers, Rsync provides the best method for transferring the logs from servers to centralized log processing server.

There are two major steps involved
a) Configuring the Log Processing Server (IP: 192.168.1.1)
b) Configuring the client (say, www.myserver.com) to transfer the logs to the central server.

Configuring the Log Processing Server

Let this server have IP address 192.168.1.1. We create a directory , /usr/local/logs, where the log files would be downloaded. We create a subdirectory for www.myserver.com, under /usr/local/logs. (mkdir /usr/local/logs/www.myserver.com)

a. create a group logman and add user logman to it. This will be the uid/gid for the log files
b. edit/create /etc/rsyncd.conf, with the following details:

uid = logman
gid = logman
use chroot = yes
max connections = 4
log file = /var/log/rsyncd.log
pid file = /etc/rsyncd.pid

[www.myserver.com_logs]
comment = here are the apache access logs from www.myserver.com downloaded
path = /usr/local/logs/www.myserver.com/
hosts allow = www.myserver.com
read only = no

c. Now, run rsync:
# rsync –daemon

We have now successfully configured our server to received log files.

Configuring the clients to transfer the logs

on the client system (www.myserver.com), run this command periodically, to transfer the logs:
rsync -azvu /usr/local/apache/logs/access_logs 192168.1.1::www.myserver.com_logs

This way, the logs would be transferred to 192.168.1.1, and would be updated (not deleted and recreated, differential transfer) everytime.