Category Archives: random updates

Moving servers again..

Posted on by
17
FragReady!

FragReady!

(EDITED)* So it seems that Fragready just knee jerks to bogus virus claims by fly by night idiots like  clean-mx.de because they are terrified of nethack on WindowsCE.  Yes really they deleted my server because of an old game on an old platform.

So here we go. again.  2013 seems to be the year of plenty of moves.  While cruising around LEB, I came across this special on Frag Ready.  So yeah I’m going to collapse all my VPS stuff (once it is finished copying) and move everything to a dedicated server.

What I’m hoping this will mean is that I can do far more neater things as now I don’t have to worry about CPU limitations, blowing my own quotas or being able to load whatever I want.  I think I’ll even go back to offering some kind of public UNIX thing, I just have to decide if I want a SIMH VAX running BSD 4.3 UWisc, or whatever.  I know I’ll certainly bring the Quake 1 server back, and maybe, just maybe hack enough to get a Doom dialup server going (if I can convince it to talk to my fake modems).

Another observation is that using the new ext4 filesystem means things are slower than ever.  I know this server is two years old but still my seven year old Mac Pro destroyes it running Qemu vs running KVM on this linux box.  I’ve found the two things help for performance some.

Convert disk images from sparse VMDK to QCOW2

# qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 -o preallocation=metadata source.vmdk destination.qcow2

And changing KVM from ‘-hda disk.vmdk’ to

kvm -cpu pentium -m 256 -drive file=/usr/local/kvm/disk.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,media=disk,cache=none -vnc :0 -net nic,model=pcnet -net user

Next was to change the way the volume was mounted.  First a change in the filesystem

tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda1

Then changing the options to the following in fstab:

noatime,data=writeback,barrier=0,nobh,errors=remount-ro

So yeah, it feels a little better now.

Here we go, again with what is moved over so far:

Crossover version 13 released today!

Posted on by
Reply

Or so I think, I got my alert while running some highly productive software..

From their announcement:

The focus of CrossOver 13.0.0 is better performance for games.
CrossOver 13.0.0 includes our new Performance Enhanced Graphics.  With
Performance Enhanced Graphics, CrossOver creates a dedicated thread
for graphics commands, making better use of the CPU and GPU.  During
in-house testing we have seen some frame rates double what they were
with earlier versions of CrossOver.

CrossOver 13.0.0 also includes numerous other enhancements for your
favorite Windows applications.  This release includes a new version of
Wine – the open source Windows API layer that makes your Windows
applications run.  On the Mac, CrossOver 13.0.0 includes several fixes
to our Mac Driver.  On Linux, we are now shipping multiarch packages
on Debian-based distributions, which should make for smoother
installation of CrossOver.

A changelog for CrossOver 13.0.0 is shown below.

Mac customers with active support entitlements will be upgraded to
Crossover 13 the next time they launch Crossover. Linux users can
download the latest version from http://www.codeweavers.com/.

If Crossover asks for registration use your codeweavers.com email
address & password to register and unlock Crossover. Email
[email protected] if you need more help.

Thank you all for your support, and we hope you enjoy CrossOver 13.0.0!

Changelog:
==========
CrossOver 13.0.0 – 11/12/2013

* Games Support:

o CrossOver 13 has our new Performance Enhanced Graphics. Games will run
faster, with higher frame rates! This is a major overhaul of the 3D
graphics processing in CrossOver, and gives significant improvements in
many, many popular games.
o The launcher for Borderlands 2 is working.
o Both the Gem Store and mouse work with Guild Wars 2.
o The mouse pointer in Terraria is now accurate when the window is resized or
zoomed.
o Rendering bugs with RIFT on NVIDIA hardware are fixed.
o Multi-core rendering can now be enabled in Source games.
o Mirror’s Edge now runs under CrossOver.

* Mac OS X:

o Input Managers will no longer cause Windows applications
running under CrossOver to crash.
o When you Command-Tab out of a full-screen program and then back,
CrossOver will restore that program’s display resolution setting.
o CrossOver uses accelerated OpenGL in all cases.
o Added support for Mac-style full-screen windows.
o Enhanced the system tray icon support to handle right-clicks and
middle-clicks.
o Fix a bug which could cause CrossOver to display two mouse
cursors in some applications.
o Lots of window management fixes.
o Fixed scrolling going diagonal when it shouldn’t.
o Fixed certain programs (e.g. Quicken 2013) failing to launch when
using certain keyboard layouts (e.g. US International PC).
o Fixed a bug where the select-bottle section of the Software Installer
window would say Please Wait forever.
o Improved icon extraction from Windows executables.

* Linux:

o Architecture specifications have been removed from our package installer
filenames. That is, our package installers filenames no longer include the
‘i386’ specifier. This is purely a cosmetic change in the filenames we ship
– some customers were confused, believing they needed a different installer
for 64-bit machines, which is not true after the switch to multiarch.
o Files saved with Microsoft Office are no longer marked as ‘executable,’
meaning they can be opened by clicking on them in Nautilus or other file
browsers.

* Application Support:

o Project 2010 will run faster.
o Macros function much better in Microsoft Excel.
o Access 2000 user interaction is smoother on OS X.
o The system tray for QQ is functional now on OS X.
o Kayak Foundry will load files again.
o Fixed a crash in the Chinese version of Microsoft Office Home and Student
Edition.

 

I’m one of the people who ‘flocked the vote‘ back in the day for a free version, and now I get new versions for something like $30 USD a year.  I know I could probably build wine on its own, but honestly even back in 1994 building wine was a PITA, and I’m too old to care about doing it now.  I just kinda want it to work.

Some random updates

Posted on by
Reply

First I just found out about the KVM Forum 2013, taking place in Edinburgh, Scotland.

You can find all kinds of information and videos of the presentation on the G+ page!

This is an incredible resource for anyone thinking of deploying KVM (Proxmox/VE!) in a serious setting.  Unlike VMWare ESX this is a free solution with no insane license restrictions.  Not to mention that KVM+Qemu is far more flexible than any traditional x86 focused hypervisor will ever be.  And poor Microsoft still doesn’t yet offer x86_64 solution.

I also got a ping back from Linux Lifestyle, about a challenge to find an ancient version of Linux.  Although the real credit goes to the excellent preservation work of oldlinux.org .

Personal note, I got the flu (again!) and have been sick.. which is why the lag in the network stuff, but I’ll bang more on it tomorrow.  I’ll finally get to adding remote sites, routing protocols, and all that fun stuff.  Internet/NAT/Firewalls afterwards.  ASA stuff too, as much as I don’t like them.

Upgrading Debian Squeeze to Wheezy

Posted on by
4

These are just my notes on what I had to do, while upgrading my VPS from Debian Squeeze (6.0.7) to Debian Wheezy (7.1)

Just to verify what version I’m running:

# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Debian
Description:	Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.7 (squeeze)
Release:	6.0.7
Codename:	squeeze

First edit the /etc/apt/sources.list to include ONLY

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

# squeeze-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main contrib non-free

Next we walk apt through an update/upgrade phase to make sure everything is current before we do the actual upgrade

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Now we have to make sure no packages are being held from being upgraded:

dpkg --audit
dpkg --get-selections | grep hold

Then we run ‘aptitude’ and press ‘g’ hoping to get the message:

No packages are scheduled to be installed, removed or upgraded

Which means we are ready to proceed with the upgrade!

Now edit /etc/apt/sources.list to ONLY include:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-security wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

Now we are ready to pull the trigger!

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Provided that went well, we can now reboot into the new system!

# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 7.1 (wheezy)
Release: 7.1
Codename: wheezy

Caveats!

First thing I had an issue with, was re-running apt-get update/apt-get upgrade I got the following errors:

The following packages have been kept back:

db4.8-util ia32-libs

So let’s fix the ia32-libs issue first.  For those who don’t know, ia32-libs lets x86_64 systems run old i386 32bit binaries.  Trying a simple ‘fix’ of installing the libraries got me this:

# apt-get install ia32-libs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 ia32-libs : Depends: ia32-libs-i386 but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
#

Luckily the fix is rather simple, we need to add the i386 architecture, like this:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386

Then re-run an apt-get udate/apt-get upgrade, followed by the installation of the ia32 libraries:

#apt-get install ia32-libs

And that settled that out.

The db4.8-util thing was somewhat easier:

 

# apt-get install   db4.8-util
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  lib32asound2 lib32bz2-1.0 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32tinfo5
  lib32v4l-0 lib32z1 libc6-i386 libio-stringy-perl libjpeg62
  libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
  libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-system2.0-cil libmysqlclient16 libsox1b
  libt1-5 mono-2.0-gac
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libdb4.8
The following packages will be upgraded:
  db4.8-util
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 829 kB of archives.
After this operation, 121 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

Which seemed to be fixing things, but it was an out of date mono installation on my part. So I had to re-add the location where I got my mono:

deb http://debian.meebey.net/pkg-mono ./

Then remove it

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get remove mono-2.0

Then remove the mono line from the /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install mono-2.0

Another error message I saw in my apache error log was this:

Error: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20100525/suhosin.so' -
/usr/lib/php5/20100525/suhosin.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown, line 0

Which can be traced to a no longer supported extension suhosin. So I just purged it from the system:

aptitude purge php5-suhosin

Another problem that has cropped up is the following when adding or removing packages:

dpkg: warning: files list file for package ‘libc6:i386’ missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package ‘libtinfo5:i386’ missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package ‘liblzma5:i386’ missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
dpkg: warning: files list file for package ‘libavahi-common-data:i386’ missing; assuming package has no files currently installed

I’m not sure why this suddenly happened.  However the fix is simple enough, we just have to regenerate the lists, something like this for libc:

dpkg-deb -c /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.13-37_i386.deb | awk {‘print $6’} | cut -f2- -d. | sed ‘s|^/$|/.|’ | sed ‘s|/$||’ > /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6:i386.list

And that seems to be it so far.

TTPod restricted ip address…

Posted on by
8

So my wife loves this Chinese application TTPod, which lets you listen to music.  And oh joy last night it suddenly stops working because of an error of “invalid ip address”.

Well it seems that the application will now only fully work in China.  Even though we are in a SAR (Hong Kong) it isn’t good enough it would seem.

I haven’t used Pandora in ages, and I thought I’d try that to get the same thing.

So for people who like this kind of thing, (esp my wife who just must have facebook while we are in China) I use OverPlay which has VPN endpoints in numerous countries, and supports things like OpenVPN & PPTP which is perfect for devices like iPhone & Android Phones.  So I can still get my BBC & CBC Fix, along with access to my Hulu subscription while abroad.

I swear that IP restrictions are so retarded, all they do is make you funnel traffic to get around them, and punish expats.

So yeah, welcome to Germany

Posted on by
10

My VPS is back online, in a different country.  I didn’t realize it a the time, but my provider is German, and well they are super pissed off about the US spying thing, and they pulled everything back.

I’m still in Hong Kong, and I just hope it is faster for me…

Although from the stats, the vast majority of my readership is American, which I guess isn’t too surprising.

 

At least the internet isn’t censored… yet… Not that I’m all that controversial.

More Snowden fallout

Posted on by
Reply

So my VPS provider got all spooked about the spooks spooking the US internet and pulled the plug.  This left me in a kind of haphazard state but there isn’t much I can do.

And considering that everyone seems to want out of the US hosting space I’ve moved my blog to Egypt for the time being.

So yeah.

I have backups of everything else, but I’m not all that sure I want to load it up on Egypt…..

But at least virtuallyfun is back in action.

Sad day for people who signed onto SUN’s virtualization strategies.

Posted on by
5

From slashdot, Oracle to stop developing SUN virtualization technologies.  In a way I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner, as chasing after VMWare isn’t part of Larry’s strategy to take over the world with databases.

How long does the SPARC have left to live?

Or Solaris for that matter?

—edit seems they are going to keep VirtualBOX afterall!

https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/important_information_about_oracle_desktop

 

Going forward, Oracle’s desktop portfolio investments will be focused on continued development and new enhancements to both Oracle Secure Global Desktop and Oracle VM VirtualBox software.