Fri 01 Jan 2010
Tags: linux, anycast, dns, sysadmin
(Okay, brand new year - must be time to get back on the blogging wagon ...)
Linux Journal recently had a really good article
by Philip Martin on Anycast DNS. It's
well worth a read - I just want to point it out and record a cutdown version of
how I've been setting it up recently.
As the super-quick intro, anycast is the idea of providing a network service
at multiple points in a network, and then routing requests to the 'nearest'
service provider for any particular client. There's a one-to-many relationship
between an ip address and the hosts that are providing services on that address.
In the LJ article above, this means you provide a service on a /32 host address,
and then use a(n) (interior) dynamic routing protocol to advertise that address
to your internal routers. If you're a non-cisco linux shop, that means using
quagga/ospf.
The classic anycast service is dns, since it's stateless and benefits from the
high availability and low latency benefits of a distributed anycast service.
So here's my quick-and-dirty notes on setting up an anycast dns server on
CentOS/RHEL using dnsmasq for dns, and quagga zebra/ospfd for the routing.
First, setup your anycast ip address (e.g. 192.168.255.1/32) on a random
virtual loopback interface e.g. lo:0. On CentOS/RHEL, this means you want
to setup a /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-lo:0 file containing:
DEVICE=lo:0
IPADDR=192.168.255.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.255
ONBOOT=yes
Setup your dns server to listen to (at least) your anycast dns interface.
With dnsmasq, I use an /etc/dnsmasq.conf config like:
interface=lo:0
domain=example.com
local=/example.com/
resolv.conf=/etc/resolv.conf.upstream
expand-hosts
domain-needed
bogus-priv
Use quagga's zebra/ospfd to advertise this host address to your internal
routers. I use a completely vanilla zebra.conf, and an /etc/quagga/ospfd.conf
config like:
hostname myhost
password mypassword
log syslog
!
router ospf
! Local segments (adjust for your network config and ospf areas)
network 192.168.1.0/24 area 0
! Anycast address redistribution
redistribute connected metric-type 1
distribute-list ANYCAST out connected
!
access-list ANYCAST permit 192.168.255.1/32
That's it. Now (as root) start everything up:
ifup lo:0
for s in dnsmasq zebra ospfd; do
service $s start
chkconfig $s on
done
tail -50f /var/log/messages
And then check on your router that the anycast dns address is getting advertised
and picked up by your router. If you're using cisco, you're probably know how to
do that; if you're using linux and quagga, the useful vtysh commands are:
show ip ospf interface <interface>
show ip ospf neighbor
show ip ospf database
show ip ospf route
show ip route
Sat 19 Sep 2009
Tags: linux, skype, voip, centos
The new skype 2.1 beta
(woohoo - Linux users are now only 2.0 versions behind Windows, way to go Skype!)
doesn't come with a CentOS rpm, unlike earlier versions. And the Fedora packages
that are available are for FC9 and FC10, which are too recent to work on a stock
RHEL/CentOS 5 system.
So here's how I got skype working nicely on CentOS 5.3, using the static binary
tarball.
Note that while it appears skype has finally been ported to 64-bit architectures, the
only current 64-bit builds are for Ubuntu 8.10+, so installing on a 64-bit CentOS
box requires 32-bit libraries to be installed (sigh). Otherwise you get the error:
skype: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory.
# the available generic skype binaries are 32-bit, so if you're running a 64-bit
# system you need to make sure you have various 32-bit libraries installed
yum install glib2.i386 qt4.i386 zlib.i386 alsa-lib.i386 libX11.i386 \
libXv.i386 libXScrnSaver.i386
# installing to /opt (tweak to taste)
cd /tmp
wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-static
cd /opt
tar jxvf /tmp/skype_static-2.1.0.47.tar.bz2
ln -s skype_static-2.1.0.47 skype
# Setup some symlinks (the first is required for sounds to work, the second is optional)
ln -s /opt/skype /usr/share/skype
ln -s /opt/skype/skype /usr/bin/skype
You don't seem to need pulseaudio installed (at least with the static binary - I assume it's
linked in statically already).
Tangentially, if you have any video problems with your webcam, you might want to check out
the updated video drivers available in the
kmod-video4linux package from the shiny new
ELRepo.org. I'm using their updated uvcvideo module with a Logitech
QuickCam Pro 9000 and Genius Slim 1322AF, and both are working well.
Sat 19 Sep 2009
Tags: linux, centos, rhel, yum
Found a nice post today on
how to use yum to download source RPMs,
rather than having to do a manual search on the relevant mirror.
Thu 06 Aug 2009
Tags: linux, lvm
Lots of people make use of linux's lvm (Logical Volume Manager) for
providing services such as disk volume resizing and snapshotting under linux.
But few people seem to know about the little pvmove utility, which offers a
very powerful facility for migrating data between disk volumes on the fly.
Let's say, for example, that you have a disk volume you need to rebuild for
some reason. Perhaps you want to change the raid type you're using on it;
perhaps you want to rebuild it using larger disks. Whatever the reason, you
need to migrate all your data to another temporary disk volume so you can
rebuild your initial one.
The standard way of doing this is probably to just create a new filesystem on
your new disk volume, and then copy or rsync all the data across. But how
do you verify that you have all the data at the end of the copy, and that
nothing has changed on your original disk after the copy started? If you did
a second rsync and nothing new was copied across, and the disk usage totals
exactly match, and you remember to unmount the original disk immediately,
you might have an exact copy. But if your original disk data is changing at
all, getting a good copy of a large disk volume can actually be pretty tricky.
The elegant lvm/pvmove solution to this problem is this: instead of doing
a userspace migration between disk volumes, you add your new volume into the
existing volume group, and then tell lvm to move all the physical extents
off of your old physical volume, and the migration is magically handled by
lvm, without even needing to unmount the logical volume!
# Volume group 'extra' exists on physical volume /dev/sdc1
$ lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% Convert
data extra -wi-ao 100.00G
# Add new physical volume /dev/sdd1 into volume group
$ vgextend extra /dev/sdd1
Volume group "extra" successfully extended
$ lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% Convert
data extra -wi-ao 200.00G
# Use pvmove to move physical extents off of old /dev/sdc1 (verbose mode)
$ pvmove -v /dev/sdc1
# Lots of output in verbose mode ...
# Done - remove old physical volume
$ pvremove /dev/sdc1
$ lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% Convert
data extra -wi-ao 100.00G
The joys of linux.
Wed 10 Jun 2009
Tags: perl, osd, desktop
Here's a quick hack demonstrating a nice juxtaposition between the
power of a CPAN module - in this case Christopher Laco's
Finance::Currency::Convert::WebserviceX
- and the elegance and utility of the little known osd_cat, putting
together a desktop currency rates widget in a handful of lines:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use IO::File;
use Finance::Currency::Convert::WebserviceX;
# Configuration
my @currencies = map { uc } @ARGV || qw(USD GBP);
my $base_currency = 'AUD';
my $refresh = 300; # seconds
my $font = '9x15bold';
# X colours: http://sedition.com/perl/rgb.html
my $colour = 'goldenrod3';
my $align = 'right';
my $pos = 'top';
my $offset = 25;
my $lines = scalar @currencies;
my $osd_refresh = $refresh + 1;
my $osd = IO::File->new(
"|osd_cat -l $lines -d $osd_refresh -c '$colour' -f $font -p $pos -A $align -o $offset"
) or die "can't open to osd_cat $!";
$osd->autoflush(1);
local $SIG{PIPE} = sub { die "pipe failed: $!" };
my $cc = Finance::Currency::Convert::WebserviceX->new;
while (1) {
my $output = '';
$output .= "$_ " . $cc->convert(1, $base_currency, $_) . "\n" for @currencies;
$osd->print($output);
sleep $refresh;
}
Most of this is just housekeeping around splitting out various osd_cat
options for tweaking, and allowing the set of currencies to display
to be passed in as arguments. I haven't bothered setting up any option
handling in order to keep the example short, but that would be
straightforward.
To use, you just run from the command line in the background:
./currency_osd &
and it shows up in the top right corner of your screen, like so:
Tweak to taste, of course.
Tue 09 Jun 2009
Tags: delicious_css, delicious, css, user styles
Further to my Delicious CSS post, here's a javascript
bookmarklet to make adding delicious css tags that much easier:
Delicious CSS
Just drag it to your bookmarks toolbar somewhere, and click to use.
Unfortunately, the latest version of the delicious tag form doesn't accept
tag arguments in the URL, which is what we need to preset the delicious_css
tags we need. To workaround this, you need to also install the
Auto-Fill Delicious Tag Field
greasemonkey script.
Sat 30 May 2009
Tags: delicious_css, delicious, css, user styles
And from the quick-weekend-hack department ...
Ever wanted to quickly add a style to a page you were on to make it
more usable? If you're a Firefox user with Firebug installed you can
do that directly, but it's a temporary and local-only solution. User
stylesheets are more permanent, but at least in Firefox
(as I've complained before)
they're relatively difficult to use, and they're still a single-host
solution.
I've wanted a lightweight method of defining and applying user styles
on the network for ages now, and this weekend it struck me that a simple
and relatively elegant hack would be to just store user styles as
delicious tags, applying them to a page via
a greasemonkey script.
So here it is: available at userscripts.org is a
relatively trivial Delicious CSS
greasemonkey script. It looks for delicious bookmarks belonging to a list
of specified delicious usernames that are tagged with
delicious_css=<current_domain>,
and applies any 'style tags' it finds on that bookmark to the current
page.
Say if for example you wanted to hide the sidebar on my blog and make
the content wider, you might do this in CSS:
div#sidebar { display: none }
div#main { width: 100% }
To define these rules for Delicious CSS you'd just create a bookmark
for www.openfusion.net with the following tags:
delicious_css
delicious_css=www.openfusion.net
div#sidebar=display:none
div#main=width:100%
Note that since delicious tags are space-separated, you have to be
careful to avoid spaces.
The general format of the style tags is:
ELT[,ELT...]=STYLE[;STYLE...]
so more complex styles are fine too. Here for example are the styles
I'm using for the Sydney Morning Herald:
div.header,div.sidebar,div.aside,div.ad,div.footer=display:none
div#content,div.col1,.span-11=width:100%
body=background:none
which turns this:
into this:
And to setup a new machine, all you need to do is install the
Delicious CSS greasemonkey script, adjust the usernames you're
trusting, and all your styles are available immediately.
I'll be setting up my userstyles under my 'gavincarr' delicious account,
so you should be able to find additional examples at
http://delicious.com/gavincarr/delicious_css.
Fri 29 May 2009
Tags: delicious, feeds, web
I've been playing with using delicious
as a lightweight URL database lately, mostly for use by
greasemonkey
scripts of various kinds (e.g.
squatter_redirect).
For this kind of use I really just need a lightweight anonymous
http interface to the bookmarks, and delicious provides a number of
nice lightweight RSS and JSON feeds
suitable for this purpose.
But it turns out the feed I really need isn't currently available.
I mostly want to be able to ask, "Give me the set of bookmarks stored
for URL X by user Y", or even better, "Give me the set of bookmarks
stored for URL X by users Y, Z, and A".
Delicious have a feed for recent bookmarks by URL:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/url/{url md5}
and a feed for all a user's bookmarks:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/{username}
and feeds for a user's bookmarks limited by tag(s):
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/{username}/{tag[+tag+...+tag]}
but not one for a user limited by URL, or for URL limited by user.
Neither alternative approach is both feasible and reliable: searching
by url will only return the most recent set of N bookmarks; and searching
by user and walking the entire (potentially large) set of their bookmarks
is just too slow.
So for now I'm having to workaround the problem by adding a special
hostname tag to my bookmarks (e.g. squatter_redirect=www.openfusion.net),
and then using the username+tag feed as a proxy for my username+domain
search.
Any cluesticks out there? Any nice delicious folk want to whip up a shiny
new feed for the adoring throngs? :-)
Mon 20 Apr 2009
Tags: delicious, greasemonkey, squatter_domain, squatter_redirect
A few weeks ago I hit a couple of domain squatter sites in quick
succession and got a bit annoyed. I asked on twitter/identi.ca
whether anyone knew of any kind of domain squatter database on the
web, perhaps along the lines of the email RBL lists, but got no
replies.
I thought at the time that delicious might
be useful for this, in much the same way that Jon Udell has been
exploring
using delicious for collaborative
event curation.
So here's the results of some hacking time this weekend:
Squatter Redirect,
a greasemonkey script (i.e. firefox only,
sorry) that checks whether the sites you visit have been tagged on
delicious as squatter domains that should be directed elsewhere, and
if so, does the redirect in your browser.
Here's a few squatter domains to try it out on:
The script checks two delicious accounts - your personal account, so
you can add your own domains without having to wait for them to be
pulled into the 'official' squatter_redirect stream; and the
official squatter_redirect delicious account, into which other
people's tags are periodically pulled after checking.
Marking a new domain as a squatter simply involves creating a delicious
bookmark for the squatter page with a few special tags:
squatter_redirect - flagging the bookmark for the attention of
the squatter_redirect delicious usersquatter_redirect=www.realdomain.com - setting the real domain that you
want to be redirected to- (optional)
squatter_domain=www.baddomain.com - marker for the
squatter domain itself (only required if you want to use from your own
delicious account)
So www.quagga.org above would be tagged:
squatter_redirect squatter_redirect=www.quagga.net
# or, optionally:
squatter_redirect squatter_redirect=www.quagga.net squatter_domain=www.quagga.org
Feedback/comments welcome.
Tue 31 Mar 2009
Tags: linux, tips
Note to self: here's how to get a quick overview of the hardware on a
linux box:
perl -F"\s*:\s*" -ane "chomp \$F[1];
print qq/\$F[1] / if \$F[0] =~ m/^(model name|cpu MHz)/;
print qq/\n/ if \$F[0] eq qq/\n/" /proc/cpuinfo
grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo
grep SwapTotal /proc/meminfo
fdisk -l /dev/[sh]d? 2>/dev/null | grep Disk
Particularly useful if you're auditing a bunch of machines (via an ssh
loop or clusterssh or something) and want a quick 5000-foot view of
what's there.
Sun 29 Mar 2009
Tags: asx, asx20, shares, atom, rss, syndication
Question: you're a small investor with a handful of small share
investments in Australian companies listed on the ASX. How do you
keep track of the announcements those companies make to the ASX?
There are a couple of manual methods you can use. You can bookmark
the announcements page on the various company websites you're
interested in and go and check them periodically, but that's
obviously pretty slow and labour intensive.
Or you can go to a centralised point, the
ASX Announcements Page,
and search for all announcements from there. Unfortunately, the ASX
only lets you search for one company at a time, so that's also
pretty slow, and still requires you do all the checking manually -
there's no automation available without subscribing to the ASX's
expensive data feed services.
There are also other third-party subscription services you can pay for
that will do this for you, but it's annoying to have to pay for what
is rightly public information.
The better answer is for the company themselves to provide their
announcements through some sort of push mechanism. The traditional
method is via email, where you subscribe to company announcements,
and they show up in your inbox shortly after they're released.
But the best and most modern solution is for companies to provide a
syndication feed on their website in a format like RSS or Atom, which
can be monitored and read using feed readers like
Google Reader,
Mozilla Thunderbird,
or Omea Reader. Feeds are superior
to email announcments in that they're centralised and lightweight (big
companies don't have to send out thousands of emails, for instance), and
they're a standardised format, and so can be remixed and repurposed in
lots of interesting ways.
So out of interest I did a quick survey of the current ASX20 (the top 20
list of companies on the ASX according to Standards and Poors) to see how
many of them support syndicating their announcements either by email or by
RSS/Atom. Here are the results:
Some summary ratings:
- Grade: A - announcements available via web, email, and RSS: AMP, ORG, RIO, SUN, TLS, WES, WOW (7)
- Grade: B - announcements available via web and email: BHP, BXB, CBA, CSL, MQG, WDC, WPL (7)
- Grade: C - announcements available via web: ANZ, FGL, NAB, NCM, QBE, WBC (6)
Overall, I'm relatively impressed that 7 of the ASX20 do support RSS. On the
down side, the fact that another 6 don't even provide an email announcements
service is pretty ordinary, especially considering the number of retail
shareholders who hold some of these stocks (e.g. three of the big four banks,
bonus points to CBA, the standout).
Special bonus points go to:
Suncorp Metway and Wesfarmers, who also offer RSS feeds for upcoming calendar
events;
Rio Tinto, who have their own announcements twitter account.
Corrections and updates are welcome in the comments.
Sat 28 Mar 2009
Tags: scripting, perl
Was going home on the train with Hannah (8) this afternoon, and she says,
"Dad, what's the longest word you can make without using any letters with
tails or stalks?". "Do you really want to know?", I asked, and whipping
out the trusty laptop, we had an answer within a couple of train stops:
egrep -v '[A-Zbdfghjklpqty]' /usr/share/dict/words | \
perl -nle 'chomp; push @words, $_;
END { @words = sort { length($b) cmp length($a) } @words;
print join "\n", @words[0 .. 9] }'
noncarnivorousness
nonceremoniousness
overcensoriousness
carnivorousnesses
noncensoriousness
nonsuccessiveness
overconsciousness
semiconsciousness
unacrimoniousness
uncarnivorousness
Now I just need to teach her how to do that.
Mon 09 Mar 2009
Tags: cityrail, timetables, greasemonkey
I got sufficiently annoyed over last week's
Cityrail
Timetable
fiasco
that I thought I'd contribute something to the making-Cityrail-bearable
software ecosystem.
So this post is to announce a new Greasemonkey script
called Cityrail Timetables Reloaded
[CTR], available at the standard Greasemonkey repository on
userscripts.org, that cleans up and extensively
refactors Cityrail's standard timetable pages.
Here's a screenshot of Cityrail's initial timetable page for the Northern
line:
and here's the same page with CTR loaded:
CTR loads a configurable number of pages rather than forcing you to click
through them one by one, and in fact will load the whole set if you tell it
to.
It also has support for you specifying the 'from' and 'to' stations you're
travelling between, and will highlight them for you, as well as omit stations
well before or well after yours, and any trains that don't actually stop at
your stations. This can compress the output a lot, allowing you to fit more
pages on your screen:
I can't see Cityrail having a problem with this script since it's just
taking their pages and cleaning them up, but we shall see.
If you're a firefox/greasemonkey user please try it out and post your
comments/feedback here or on the userscripts site.
Enjoy!
Wed 04 Mar 2009
Tags: soul, rant, FAIL
What's a blog if not a vehicle for an occasional rant?
I used to have a mobile with Soul Communications, and recently
changed to another provider because Soul cancelled the plan I'd
been on with them for 3 or 4 years. I ported my number, and
gathered that that would close the Soul account, and all would be
good. Soul has a credit card on that account that they've billed
for the last 3 years or so without problems. I've had nothing
from them to indicate there are any issues.
And so today I get a Notice of Demand and Disconnection from Soul
advising me that my account is overdue, charging me additional
debt recovery fees, and advising that if I don't pay all
outstanding amounts immediately it'll be referred to debt
collectors.
Nice work Soul.
So let's recap. I've had no notices that my account is overdue,
no contact from anyone from Soul, no indication that there are
any issues, and then a Notice of Demand?
I go and check my email, in case I've missed something. Two
emails from Soul since the beginning of the year, the most recent
from a week ago. They're HTML-only, of course, and I use a text
email client, but hey, I'll go the extra mile and fire up an HTML
email client to workaround the fact that multipart/alternative is
a bit too hard.
The emails just say, "Your Soul Bill is Now Available", and point
to the "MySoul Customer Portal". (Yes, it would be nice if it was
a link to the actual bill, of course, rather than expecting me
to navigate through their crappy navigation system, but that's
clearly a bit too sophisticated as well; but I digress.) There's no
indication in any of the emails that anything is amiss, like a
"Your account is overdue" message or something. So no particular
reason I would have bothered to go and actually login to their
portal, find my bill, and review it, right? They've got the credit
card, right?
So let's go and check the bill. Go to "MySoul Salvation Portal",
or whatever it's called, dig out obscure customer number and
sekrit password, and login. Except I can't. "This account is
inactive."
Aaaargh!
So let's recap:
account has been cancelled due to move to another carrier
(yippee!)
can't login to super-customer-portal to get bills
emails from Soul do not indicate there are any problems with
the account
no other emails from the Soul saying "we have a problem"
maybe they could, like, phone my mobile, since they do have
the number - no, too hard!
Epic mega stupendous FAIL! What a bunch of lusers.
So now I've phoned Soul, had a rant, and been promised that they'll
email me the outstanding accounts. That was half an hour ago, and
nothing in the inbox yet. I get the feeling they don't really want
to be paid.
And I feel so much better now. :-)
Tue 03 Mar 2009
Tags: mod_auth_tkt, apache
I'm happy to announce the release of mod_auth_tkt 2.0.1, the first full release
of mod_auth_tkt in a couple of years. The 2.0.x release includes numerous
enhancements and bugfixes, including guest login support and full support for
apache 2.2.
mod_auth_tkt is a lightweight single-sign-on authentication module for apache,
supporting versions 1.3.x, 2.0.x, and 2.2.x. It uses secure cookie-based
tickets to implement a single-signon framework that works across multiple
apache instances and servers. It's also completely repository agnostic,
relying on a user-supplied script to perform the actual authentication.
The release is available as a tarball and various RPMs from the
mod_auth_tkt homepage.
Tue 24 Feb 2009
Tags: web, disqus
I'm trying out disqus, since I like the idea
of being able to track/collate my comments across multiple endpoints,
rather than have them locked in to various blogging systems. So this
is a test post to try out commenting. Please feel free to comment ad
nauseum below (and sign up for a disqus account, if you don't already
have one).
Thu 05 Feb 2009
Tags: centos, rpm, openfusion
Updated 2014-09-26 for CentOS 7.
Over the last few years I've built up quite a collection of packages
for CentOS, and distribute them via a yum repository. They're typically
packages that aren't included in
DAG/RPMForge when I need them, so I just
build them myself. In case they're useful to other people, this post
documents the repository locations, and how you can get setup to make
use of it yourself.
Obligatory Warning: this is a personal repository, so it's
primarily for packages I want to use myself on a particular platform
i.e. coverage is uneven, and packages won't be as well tested as
a large repository like RPMForge. Also, I routinely build packages
that replace core packages, so you'll want the repo disabled by
default if that concerns you. Use at your own risk, packages may nuke
your system and cause global warming, etc. etc.
Locations:
To add the Open Fusion repository to your yum configuration, just
install the following 'openfusion-release' package:
# CentOS 5:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://repo.openfusion.net/centos5-x86_64/openfusion-release-0.7-1.of.el5.noarch.rpm
# CentOS 6:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://repo.openfusion.net/centos6-x86_64/openfusion-release-0.7-1.of.el6.noarch.rpm
# CentOS 7:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://repo.openfusion.net/centos7-x86_64/openfusion-release-0.7-1.of.el7.noarch.rpm
And here are the openfusion-release packages as links:
Feedback and suggestions are welcome. Packaging
requests are also welcome, particularly when they involve my
wishlist. ;-)
Enjoy.
Wed 26 Nov 2008
Tags: web, qtcba
Was thinking this morning about my interactions with the web over
the last couple of weeks, and how I've been frustrated with not
being able to (simply) get answers to relatively straightforward
questions from the automated web. This is late 2008, and Google
and Google Maps and Wikipedia and Freebase etc. etc. have clearly
pushed back the knowledge boundaries here hugely, but at the same
time lots of relatively simple questions are as yet largely
unanswerable.
By way of qualification, I mean are not answerable in an automated
fashion, not that they cannot be answered by asking the humans on
the web (invoking the 'lazyweb'). I also don't mean that these
questions are impossible to answer given the time and energy to
collate the results available - I mean that they are not simply
and reasonably trivially answerable, more or less without work on
my part. (e.g. "How do I get to address X" was kind of answerable
before Google Maps, but they were arguably the ones who made it
more-or-less trivial, and thereby really solved the problem.)
So in the interests of helping delineate some remaining frontiers,
and challenging ourselves, here's my catalogue of questions from
the last couple of weeks:
what indoor climbing gyms are there in Sydney?
where are the indoor climbing gyms in Sydney (on a map)?
what are the closest gyms to my house?
how much are the casual rates for adults and children for the
gyms near my house?
what are the opening hours for the gyms near my house?
what shops near my house sell the Nintendo Wii?
what shops near my house have the Wii in stock?
what shops near my house are selling Wii bundles?
what is the pricing for the Wii and Wii bundles from shops near my
house?
of the shops near my house that sell the Wii, who's open late on
Thursdays?
of the shops near my house that sell the Wii, what has been the best
pricing on bundles over the last 6 months?
trading off distance to travel against price, where should I buy a Wii?
what are the "specials" at the supermarkets near my house this week?
given our grocery shopping habits and the current specials, which
supermarket should I shop at this week?
I need cereal X - do any of the supermarkets have have it on special?
That's a useful starting set from the last two weeks. Anyone else? What
are your recent questions-that-cannot-be-answered? (And if you blog, tag
with #qtcba pretty please).
Fri 07 Nov 2008
Tags: perl, css, javascript, minify, yslow, catalyst, mason
I've been playing with the very nice
YSlow firefox plugin recently,
while doing some front-end optimisation on a
Catalyst web project.
Most of YSlow's tuning tips were reasonably straightforward, but I
wasn't sure how to approach the concatenation and minification of
CSS and javascript files that they recommend.
Turns out - as is often the case - there's a very nice packaged
solution on CPAN.
The File::Assets
module provides concatentation and minification for CSS and
Javascript 'assets' for a web page, using the
CSS::Minifier
(::XS) and
JavaScript::Minifier
(::XS)
modules for minification. To use, you add a series of .css and .js
files in building your page, and then 'export' them at the end,
which generates a concatenated and minified version of each type
in an export directory, and an appropriate link to the exported
version. You can do separate exports for CSS and Javascript if you
want to follow the Yahoo/YSlow recommendation of putting your
stylesheets at the top and your scripts at the bottom.
There's also a
Catalyst::Plugin::Assets
module to facilitate using File::Assets from Catalyst.
I use Mason for my Catalyst views (I prefer
using perl in my views rather than having another mini-language to
learn) and so use this as follows.
First, you have to configure Catalyst::Plugin::Assets in your
project config file (e.g. $PROJECT_HOME/project.yml):
Plugin::Assets:
path: /static
output_path: build/
minify: 1
Next, I set the per-page javascript and and css files I want to
include as mason page attributes in my views (using an arrayref
if there's more than one item of the given type) e.g.
%# in my person view
<%attr>
js => [ 'jquery.color.js', 'person.js' ]
css => 'person.css'
</%attr>
Then in my top-level autohandler, I include both global and
per-page assets like this:
<%init>
# Asset collation, javascript (globals, then per-page)
$c->assets->include('js/jquery.min.js');
$c->assets->include('js/global.js');
if (my $js = $m->request_comp->attr_if_exists('js')) {
if (ref $js && ref $js eq 'ARRAY') {
$c->assets->include("js/$_") foreach @$js;
} else {
$c->assets->include("js/$js");
}
}
# The CSS version is left as an exercise for the reader ...
# ...
</%init>
Then, elsewhere in the autohandler, you add an exported link at
the appropriate point in the page:
<% $c->assets->export('text/javascript') %>
This generates a link something like the following (wrapped here):
<script src="http://www.example.com/static/build/assets-ec556d1e.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>
Beautiful, easy, maintainable.
Fri 24 Oct 2008
Tags: linux, centos, kvm, virtualisation
I've been using kvm for my virtualisation needs lately, instead of
xen, and finding it great. Disadvantages are that it requires hardware
virtualisation support, and so only works on newer Intel/AMD CPUs.
Advantages are that it's baked into recent linux kernels, and so more
or less Just Works out of the box, no magic kernels required.
There are some pretty useful resources covering this stuff out on the
web - the following sites are particularly useful:
There's not too much specific to CentOS though, so here's the recipe
I've been using for CentOS 5:
# Confirm your CPU has virtualisation support
egrep 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo
# Install the kvm and qemu packages you need
# From the CentOS Extras repository (older):
yum install --enablerepo=extras kvm kmod-kvm qemu
# OR from my repository (for most recent kernels only):
ARCH=$(uname -i)
OF_MREPO=http://www.openfusion.com.au/mrepo/centos5-$ARCH/RPMS.of/
rpm -Uvh $OF_MREPO/openfusion-release-0.3-1.of.noarch.rpm
yum install kvm kmod-kvm qemu
# Install the appropriate kernel module - either:
modprobe kvm-intel
# OR:
modprobe kvm-amd
lsmod | grep kvm
# Check the kvm device exists
ls -l /dev/kvm
# I like to run my virtual machines as a 'kvm' user, not as root
chgrp kvm /dev/kvm
chmod 660 /dev/kvm
ls -l /dev/kvm
useradd -r -g kvm kvm
# Create a disk image to use
cd /data/images
IMAGE=centos5x.img
# Note that the specified size is a maximum - the image only uses what it needs
qemu-img create -f qcow2 $IMAGE 10G
chown kvm $IMAGE
# Boot an install ISO on your image and do the install
MEM=1024
ISO=/path/to/CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-DVD.iso
# ISO=/path/to/WinXP.iso
qemu-kvm -hda $IMAGE -m ${MEM:-512} -cdrom $ISO -boot d
# I usually just do a minimal install with std defaults and dhcp, and configure later
# After your install has completed restart without the -boot parameter
# This should have outgoing networking working, but pings don't work (!)
qemu-kvm -hda $IMAGE -m ${MEM:-512} &
That should be sufficient to get you up and running with basic outgoing
networking (for instance as a test desktop instance). In qemu terms this
is using 'user mode' networking which is easy but slow, so if you want
better performance, or if you want to allow incoming connections (e.g. as
a server) you need some extra magic, which I'll cover in a
"subsequent post":kvm_bridging.
