I was noticing that kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386 are now architectures in the Debian unstable repositories. I’ve always been interested in running a GNU operating system with an alternative kernel. Of course, so far nothing has been stable enough to warrant leaving Linux. And besides, Linux does have the best mascot of all the kernels. The Linux kernel is also largely responsible for the rapid growth of the free software movement. Still, the idea is appealing and here’s where things stand with other kernels.

I've been looking for a program that would be a top-like program (ie would display a screen of information and refresh every couple seconds or so) but would give an overview of an entire system. In particular I've wanted something that could quickly narrow down the question: "Why is this server sluggish?" Traditionally I've had to use many tools to check whether the problem was CPU, Load, IO, Network, etc. So while doing a completely unrelated search (using `apt-cache search` for programs dealing with swap) I came across saidar and it seems to fit the bill nicely. It displays information about processes, memory, disks, and networking in an easy to read and digest format. It's not perfect and I might offer some suggestions to the developers but it's the best thing I've found so far for the purpose I have.

I was working on a server running MySQL and found that the debian-sys-maint account not longer existed which caused errors when upgrading the mysql packages. It was relatively simple to fix by getting the password from the /etc/mysql/debian.cnf file and running the following command:

• GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

In this case the word password is replaced by the value in the /etc/mysql/debian.cnf file.

I’ve seen this cause problems on both Xen and VMware though I suspect the problem is widespread. When a virtual ethernet device has checksumming enabled it can cause all sorts of network problems. I once got deep into debugging and found that with checksumming enabled packets larger than the MTU would be sent which would then cause a number of fragmentation messages to be sent. It was a mess, but easily correctable. Some specifics follow.

Many people, including myself, have had difficulty in getting Monit to properly stop and start mongrel processes. The problem stems from the fact that Monit restricts the PATH environment variable such that it does not work with the mongrel_rails cluster::* commands. I decided to investigate this issue to find a workable solution.

I’ve been using DTC but I’m not particularly satisfied with it. Unfortunately nothing else looks good enough to switch to. Still I did the rounds to see which projects were still active and here’s what I found:

• DTC - http://www.gplhost.com/software-dtc.html
• RavenCore - http://www.ravencore.com/
• GNUPanel - http://www.gnupanel.org/
• ISPConfig - http://www.ispconfig.org/
• SysCP - https://www.syscp.org/
• vhffs - http://www.vhffs.org/

I decided to make my system a little more open by replacing Sun’s Java with IcedTea:

• sudo apt-get install icedtea-java7-bin icedtea-java7-jre icedtea-java7-plugin
• sudo apt-get install icedtea-java7-jdk
  • I needed this for Eclipse, but if I didn’t I wouldn’t have installed it.
• sudo update-alternatives --config java
  • select: /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-icedtea/jre/bin/java

I wish I could purge the sun-java packages but unfortunately a bug prevents that. Hopefully that will be fixed in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

I also have to admit that as a tea drinker and not a coffee drinker I do like the name IcedTea.

I finally decided to get my desktop running pure amd64. No more 32-bit libraries cluttering the system. It was all too easy:

• sudo apt-get remove --purge nspluginwrapper ia32.* lib32.* libc6-i386

Now to enjoy pure 64-bit goodness.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function file_scan_directory() in /drupaldir/includes/common.inc on line 2115

I disabled caching (Administer - Site Configuration - Performance - Caching mode: Disabled) and the problem went away. This is with version 5.7 using “Cache Mode: Normal”. I hadn’t seen this on earlier versions.

In addition to the NIN Ghosts I release I’ve also been spreading the word that Neil Gaiman has released American Gods for free. He’s also graciously shared some of the dialogue of proponents and opponents of the idea. As I was talking with a friend of mine she stated a common reaction: “Who wants to read a book on a computer.” I think it’s true that people like to read a book, not just read the story on their computer screen. This leads me to believe that though the internet is disrupting many media businesses who have maintained control of their markets through their control over content distribution, the changes in business models will not be identical for all media sectors.