Worzie's blog

For several years now I have used SmoothWall Express as a personal firewall on my cable modem connection. I have been very pleased with it and have never had any successful breaches that I have been aware of. Having kids, I knew I would soon need some form of nanny filtering. Early on I investigated Dansguardian and found great support in the Homebrew forums of the SmoothWall community.

Each April computer buffs from across the Pacific Northwest trek to Bellingham, WA for Linuxfest Northwest.

Bellingham, WA, April 4, 2007 — The eighth annual Linuxfest Northwest takes place from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., April 28 and 29, 2007 at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA. Exhibits, presentations, and parking are free. All ages are welcome.

I just recently wrestled with my little smb setup here to tighten the grip on who might be accessing my share. My intention is to simply share my own smb share I have running in VmWare with my XP host. My XP host is logged into a domain server not to the local machine. The Linux I have installed in VmWare is FC5 running from USB drive and using the NAT networking setting. My company has blocked DHCP to only those machines authenticated with by the domain server. I originally used the KDE Control Center to setup my smb sharing homes.

Daylight Savings Time in the US. Is it the end of the world again March 11th 2007? For most of us our Linux boxes will be just fine. The DST change has been fixed in most modern Linux Distros. But if you are still using your 2.4 kernel based ancient distro, you may want to look into fixing it. That isn't what this tip is about rather proof that your box is going to make the switch. You should see this when you run the zdump command below:

zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

Short and sweet. Just discovered this trick. In KDE (currently using 3.5.4 FC5) if you move your mouse over the kpanel with more than one application running and over the apps or desktop area... you can use the scrolly mouse wheel to cycle through your apps. from all your desktops. An alternate keyboard method is with Alt+Tab/Ctrl+Tab but those will only alternate between apps. in the current desktop.

Friday I decided to finally get caught up with the latest Gaim IM. I'm using FC5 most of the week while at work. I had been using the latest stable 1.5 RPMs. The past couple weeks for me have been a hassle with requests for authorization and tons of spam/bots from foreign lands. For some reason my privacy setting would never stick for ICQ and MSN accounts. Even if I set them for the current session, the spam bots seem to get through still. Who knows!

Found another cool time saver tip. For me I find myself looking for partition mount points. So I usually do:

fdisk /dev/hda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4982.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders

I have done this many times following various instructions when installing perl modules but for the most part they all tell you to:

download > extract > cd into extracted dir
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

I remember there was an easier way that went out and fulfilled all dependencies but I could never remember because I just followed the README file. Today I read a post where at least a couple folks gave the same instructions I recalled using:

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install modulename

Much easier!

UPDATE:

Last weekend I finally got around to putting my latest major hardware purchase into production.

This weekend I finally got around to checking out OpenVZ. With lots of prodding from Scott, not to mention lots of help from Scott, I got this thing installed rather quickly. I pretty much followed Scott's latest article Intro to OpenVZ: Part II. I started with installing CentOS 4.4 using the custom minimalist install and updated everything. BTW this machine is an old Dell 2Ghz with 512MB RAM and 40GB drive.