Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I’ve spent most of the afternoon playing with Coppermine, one of the (many!) online gallery publishing webapps out there, as I need a gallery for my personal website. I’m pretty pleased with it, and thanks to Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen’s ebuild, installation is a doddle. Look for this appearing in the tree later this week.

There’s quite a few useful-looking utilities for Apache out there which currently aren’t in Portage. This is just a note to myself (and Beu if he’s bored to trial them locally, and if they work to (maybe) add them to Portage.

• cmdblock, a tool for spotting IIS exploiters in the Apache log file, and banning the buggers via an iptables rule
• WebDruid, a log file analyser (although personally I’m very happy with analog+reportmagic)
• Logrep
  , another log file analyser
• vlogger, a log rotator
• mod_vhs, an alternative vhost module which supports LDAP

I have two main machines for Gentoo development atm [1] (both Dell boxes); my dual-processor Xeon 2.8, and my Pentium-M 1.7 laptop (with the nice widescreen display). The dual-Xeon does all the heavy lifting for NX Server, PHP et al. (Don’t waste your time with distcc; a dual-Xeon or an AMD64 gets through large compiles much better than distcc can, and both are very affordable these days) The laptop is where I write useful tools and work on my PHP book. (You can normally find me in Starbucks in Cardiff ( ‘C’ on this map between 7:30am and 8:50am on weekdays, hacking away on Gentoo on the laptop. Wireless access in there is a bit pricey (although still a lot cheaper than what my ex-employer wants to charge for data transfer via a 3G phone), so I tend to work without Internet access).

The laptop runs Windows XP, and I use VMWare Workstation to run Gentoo. I have two virtual machines; a general-purpose one, and a ‘clean’ one set aside for testing Apache & PHP installs. When I bought the laptop last year, it was a bit of a stretch financially, so I got it with the minimum 512MB of RAM. That’s fine for Windows, but it’s a bit painful once I fire up VMWare. Especially as I now use a Gnome desktop for maintaining the vmware-linux-tools package.

So all the recent overtime I’ve been doing (which has been keeping me away from Gentoo alas) has paid for an extra 512MB of RAM for the laptop. That’ll make a nice improvement, and should see the laptop through until I replace it next year.

[1] I also have a donated Genesi PPC box, which I use for testing PHP on; there’s the AMD64 box which spends most of its time as my games machine (it used to run my old Gentoo/i386 KDE desktop, which I’ve now thankfully retired; it will run Gentoo/AMD64 when I get another SATA drive installed); and there’s Colin’s Sun SPARC U2 still waiting for me to do something with it.

http://www.nomachine.com/

I’ve just bumped nxserver-personal, to catch up with the latest release of NX Server 1.4.0-107. Haven’t had time to look at the latest freenx yet