On Tuesday, two major Internet service providers stopped routing traffic for McColo, a hosting provider based in San Jose, Calif., essentially making all sites hosted by the service inaccessible. The action followed investigations by security researchers that found that McColo had become the preferred home of for many botnets’ command and control servers…
Source: securityfocus.com

So I took a look at the statistics of our anti-spam service, and the cool thing is you can pinpoint the moment when they’ve pulled the plug on them:

• Installations is a breeze “as long as your hardware is supported”
  • For fun I tried to install it on a low end machine with an amd duron processor, didn’t want to install.
  • Didn’t support any linksys, dlink and realtek network cards I threw at it. You’re best of with broadcom or intel cards.
  • Vmware esx io guide (google it) has a list of supported storage and network hardware.
  • If your hardware is not on that list, you’re out of luck. In the Vmware IO support document, they mention the option to modify linux device drivers and compile them against the vmkernel.
    I didn’t find any documentation on this subject,  so good luck pulling this of 
  • Installation doesn’t ask many difficult questions, so really has an appliance feel to it.
• Interface: vmware infrastructure client or vmware infrastructure cli tools
  • VI client does not give you much opportunity for troubleshooting
  • Uploading stuff is not intuitive at all, there should have been a big button “UPLOAD HERE”
    instead you have to drill down some menu and then double click tiny icon “storage” which doesn’t even seem clickable. That brings up a clumsy upload screen (eg you can create folders but not rename or remove them,…)
• With a little hack you can enable ssh access
  • gives you a busybox shell
  • ability to upload stuff with scp
  • interesting commands (vmfstools, lspci, esxcfg-nics, …)
• Machines created with vmware server or workstation won’t boot out of the box,
  • You need to convert them with vmware converter, conversion process takes long. It converts + uploads the image to ESXi server in one step.
• ESXi doesn’t support IDE controllers in guest OS’es.
  This mean if you’ve made a VM in virtual server or workstation,  with a virtual ide drive, you’re screwed. Not entirely, you can add a scsi controller and convert ide disk to scsi one, and add the correct driver to the virtual OS.
  But it’s frustrating work that could have been avoided if only vmware had added ide support to esxi, just like they do in all their other products.
• ESXi doesn’t officialy support “growable”/expandable virtual disks
  Instead if you create a disk or import one, it creates a preallocated disk.  For example you’ve created a VM with a growable/expandable disk of 150GB, but only 4GB is used. When importing this VM, ESXi will turn the 4GB into a monstrous 150GB vmdk file.
  There is a way around this, using the vmfstools command (using the unsupported ssh, or maybe also through the cli tools but didn’t test that). With that tool you can create a new disk or convert an existing disk to a expandable/growable disk using the “-d thin” option.

http://www.linux-training.be/

Quickly skimmed the LinuxAdm.pdf and it looks like high quality and very complete material.

I’ve decided I wanted to dualboot Debian Etch (4.0) and OSX Tiger (10.4) on my 2005 Mac Mini.
Not that many linux distro’s support the powerpc architecture, some that I considered were:

• debian: has official support for powerpc
• ubuntu: no more official support, community support only
  I don’t know the implications of community-only support in practice, didn’t investigate this further.
• yelllow dog linux: rpm based distro specifically targeted at the powerpc architecture. Didn’t look into this further.

I chose debian for the official support and because I wanted to get more familiar with it for professional reasons. William Sowerbutts wrote an excellent guide on installing Debian Sarge (3.1) on the Mac Mini.

The installation procedure went smooth and I got a working desktop environment without any special interventions. The dual boot setup was automatically taken care of, at boot you can choose l for linux and x for osx.

Most hardware seems supported. A debian Etch installation has these mostly minor issues after the out-of-the-box installation:

• internal wireless nic doesn’t work
• soundcard doesn’t work
• doesn’t auto-recognize my widescreen, so aspect ratio is wrong (too small)

The wireless network was easy to fix. Since broadcom is apparantly not very open-source-minded, you need to download a piece of closed firmware to get the wlan supported. This firmware file is called wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o and the useful parts have to be extracted with bcm43xx-fwcutter. I downloaded both files on an usb stick, installed the bcm43xx-fwcutter dpkg package, than did this as root:
bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
Than reload the driver:
modprobe -r bcm43xx
modprobe bcm43xx
The wireless interface showed up as eth2 on my machine. This is all described for ubuntu here but it’s the same for debian.
One last pitfall: in the gnome networkmanager applet I had to paste an encoded pasword instead of the plaintext one. You can obtain the encoded password with this command:
wpa_passphrase <network_ssid> “<yourpasswordhere>”.

Installation notes:

• It’s possible to repartition your mac mini disk to make room for debian, while maintaining the original system. I did it with the free utility superduper and OSX Tiger installation disk 1. First create an image of your system using superduper, save it to an external disk. Then boot from the OSX disk (hold c while booting), don’t go through the installation wizard but choose disk utility from the menu bar at the top. Here you can repartition your disk. If your superduper backup is good, you can safely erase your existing osx partition. Create new partitions for you debian system (free space) and a new, smaller osx partition, as discussed in the sowerbutts.com guide. Possibly you’ll have to reboot from the installer cd again to be able to see/manipulate the new osx partition in the disk utility.
  Select the new smaller osx partition, click the restore tab, here you can specificy your superduper image as the source and target the osx partition. When you reboot now, it should boot from your new, smaller osx partition… In my case it didn’t,maybe it had something to do with the boot loader that was overwritten. After some trial and error I got it to boot my original system restored from the sueprduper backup. I guess the trick was first to do a clean install osx and than overwritting it with the superduper image from the OSX install livecd.

I’m posting a copy of the installation steps I took during a reinstall of OSX 10.4 on my mac mini. As I did it more than a year ago I don’t remember all the details. What I do remember is you can tremendously decrease the footprint OSX leaves on your harddisk  by doing a non-default installation.

On the preinstalled system 15GB of the 80GB disk was occupied. After doing a custom install and deselecting loads of bloat I didn’t need, it was trimmed down to 3GB. 

This 2005 first generation model of the mac mini with limited specs (powerpc, 80GB hd, 512mb ram) really benefited from this tweaked, leaner and faster OSX installation.

Here’s a list steps I followed / software I installed. Software is mostly free open source software except for superduper.

• Make backup image of old system with superduper to external disk
• superduper with basic functions is free!
• More info: SuperDuper is the most advanced, yet easy to use disk copying program available for OS X. It can, of course, make a full backup, or “clone” — in moments, you can completely duplicate your boot drive to another drive, partition, or image file. In even less time, you can update an existing clone with the latest data: use Smart Updateand, minutes later, your backup is completely up to date!
• OSX installation: choose for custom/advanced/options… whatever they call it
• By default OSX comes with 3GB of printer drivers!!!
• Deselecting the drivers you don’t need saves 2.95GB
• I didn’t use garageband, imovie, … so I deselected it, saves lots of gigabytes
• Disabled the dashboard for performance (don’t use those widgets anyway)
• Keyboard layout for a belgian, non apple (eg PC) keyboard: Ramcon Tramo sorted this out
• Vlc multimedia player, plays most video formats
• Adium (chat client for msn,…)
• Keepassx (compatible with keepass for windows)
• Handbrake (dvd ripping)
• The unarchiver (zip files,…)
• Tinkertool  - disable graphical animations etc. for performance
• Privoxy, proxy that filters adds
• Set it up privoxy so that it doesn’t log everything, configure browsers to use it (port 8118)
• Firefox
• Appdelete to completely remove unused apps
• Fugu (ssh, scp client)
• OSX commandline ftp client is quite complete/advanced, better than the windows client ofcourse
• Shadowkiller (disable shadow effect around windows, performance tweak)
• Addon for safari browser: “stand” makes it open new windows in tabs, quicksearches like in firefox
• Then why nog just use firefox? in my experience ff is less stable and slower than safari on osx
• The Gimp for photo editing
• Flip4mac to play wmv files (vlc can do this but flip4mac is for wmv files that are embedded in websites)
• AutomountMaker: automatically mount (samba) shares automatisch 
• Xcode2.5 (1 Gb! contains gnu gcc, only need this if you want to compile stuff on osx)
• Frostwire (like limewire, but opensource, java app but smooth and fast anyway).
• Editra. Text editor written in Python, cross platform, no stable version yet but the only open source text editor I like on osx

Explosively good, especially live:

Joy division – Dead Souls

Together with Nirvana the only band of which I enjoy everything they’ve made. Dead souls is their most instrumental songs. Though Ian Curtis was only about 23 years old at that time he had the voice of an old man. After seeing the movie ‘control’, I appreciate his music  even more. Don’t mind the slideshow of death artist during the song, bit creepy.

Johny Turbo – Beroepsslaapkamerdeure 

A satirical song in a Dutch dialect (West-Flemish). Johny was a local performer who was admired by (among others) students for his comical songs. The title “beroepsslaapkamerdeure” means literally “professional sleeping room door”. In this song a (hotel)door complains about being treated badly by the company and it tries to convince the rest of the hotelfurniture to join a union strike. In my opinion it’s a song critical of people who like to complain about details and dislike work.

Jay-Z – 99 problems

I dislike r&b/hiphop in general, Jay-Z might be the sole exception.   Maybe it’s because I appreciate Linkin Park and the album they made together (collision coarse) sugarcoated the pill. Or maybe he stands out of the genre in some ways.

Some things were broken on my selfhosted wordpress installation, and I had no time to look into it, so I moved to clohyment.wordpress.com. As it is hosted and maintained by the creators of wordpress, it is in good hands and frees me from keeping the wordpress installation up to date, applying security and other fixes. It was a smooth transition as I didn’t have many posts/customizations to move. In short: exporting the posts from the old site to an xml file, importing that at wordpress.com, fixing some links and the operation was finished.

Robocopy

Robocopy.exe is Microsoft’s file copy and synchronization swiss army knife. It’s a commandline tool not unlike Gnu’s rsync. Vista has it out-of-the-box, but you can download it for XP/2003 as part of the Windows Resource Toolkit.
My favorite feature is copying/syncing across fileshares using UNC paths thus without the need to mount them to a drive letter first. The worst “feature” is that it retries a failed filecopy ONE MILLION times by default, waiting 30 seconds between each attempt. This means if a temp file dissapears while syncing or if a file is locked (typically outlook .pst file), your nightly backup operation will never finish. Lucky you can easily disable this behavior. Using these switches: /W:0 /R:0 robocopy will continue copying immediately even if 1 file can’t be copied. There are numerous other advanced features like bandwith throtling, monitoring a folder for changes and triggering a copy after x changes, ….

Some robocopy tricks:

• Only copy permissions, no data
  During a file migration from and old to a new Win2003 server, all data had been copied across using explorer (conventional copy and paste). This means the original permissions were NOT kept, as the user doing the copying becomes the owner of them and they get their permissions from the new parent folder.
  I didn’t have the time to repeat the entire copy operation with a tool that is able to maintain permissions, so I used robocopy to only copy permissions without the data:

  robocopy \\oldserver\c$\test c:\test /IS /S /COPY:SOU /W:0 /R:0

  The secret is the /COPY:SOU switch which means:

  • S = Security ACLS (ntfs permissions)
  • O = Owner info
  • U = aUditing info

  There is no D so no data is copied. I don’t know if permission copying works with with Samba shares.Another tool that does this is permcopy, also part of the windows resource toolkit:

  permcopy \\oldserver sharename \\newserver sharename

  At the time I didn’t know there’s a free all-in-one tool called “Fileserver Migration Tool” from MS that obsoletes the need to manually move every individual share. It takes care of moving the shares (data+share perms+ntfs perms) to the new server and disabling them on the old server afterwards. A similar utility is available for migrating an MS printserver.

• Set-and-forget backup.bat script

  @echo off
  robocopy c:\importantdocs \\backuphost\backup /MIR /ZB /W:0 /R:0 /LOG:backuplog.txt /NFL /NDL

  This keeps \\backuphost\backup share in sync with c:\importantdocs and creates a logfile. Be warned that the /MIR switch means that files that don’t exist in the source (c:\importantdocs) WILL BE DELETED from the destination (\\backuphost\backup) !! Thus if source is empty, destination will be wiped out to, be carefull! The /ZB switch is for restartable and backup mode. Restartable mode is handy for copying large files over unstable links, backup mode uses some magic that increases robocopy’s ability to copy open files. /NFL and /DFL make sure only failed files and dirs are logged.
  Knowing myself, if I’d have to run this manually I would forget about it and don’t have a backup. To automate this you can create a Windows sheduled task that runs when the computer is no user activity on the computer for 10 minuts.
  Ofcourse there exist other smarter and better backup methods but this is one free and fast method for off-machine or even off-site backup.