The SAGE-AU Victorian regional chapter will hold it’s third annual IT Symposium on April 28th, 2006 at the Grand Chancellor Hotel in Melbourne. This one day symposium, covering topics of interest to systems administrators, is sponsored by TRT with lucky door prizes from Apple, TAS, and Payam for those who register before the day.
For details see: http://www.sage-au.org.au/conf/vic06/
linux.conf.au is the annual Australian Linux technical conference, and is one of the largest gatherings of users and developers of Free and Open Source Software in the Southern Hemisphere.
It is an opportunity for developers and groups to present their ideas amongst peers, and for the Free Software and Open Source communities to gather in general.
Visit the conference website at http://lca2006.linux.org.au.
A friend of mine asked me to troubleshoot a problem he was having with authenticating to an SSH server. Like most problems, the answer could be found buried in logs, or in this case, debug output. For those who use SSH and don’t know about -v, it time you learnt about this wonderful switch. In the UNIX world, -v usually denotes verbostiy, that is, the level of detail that the program will display. Most programs you run from the command line support -v, and often -vv and -vvv. The more v’s, the higher the level of verbosity.
Start up an SSH session from the command line:
ssh username@host -v
ssh username@host -vv
ssh username@host -vvv
If you aren’t using -v while troubleshooting, try it out, it will make your life a whole lot easier.
Thanks to all that attended my presentation on Monitoring with Nagios at the OSDC 2005 conference. You can download the slides from “Monitoring Anything and Everything with Nagios” here.
I’ve also just uploaded my first pre-release copy of a new free eBook called “The Nagios Book”. The book walks through setting up a Nagios server from scratch. There are a few areas that need content, but it still might help some people, even in it’s current form. I will be working on the eBook and accompanying website NagiosBook.org over the next week or two. If you’re interested in Nagios, visit NagiosBook.org now and check out the pre-release version. Feel free to send me your feedback.
There are now devices (or at least more of them) that provide native OS X drivers, so this document is now slightly redundant. See http://keyspan.com:16080/products/usa19hs/ for example.
After purchasing the Targus USB to Serial (PA088) Adapter, I found that the driver included was for Windows only. I needed this to work under OS X 10.4. After searching the Targus website, I found out that this device is only compatible with Windows. Hmmm.
This adapter is made for newer hardware that doesn’t come with serial ports. There are several adapters (or converters) on the market, the Targus PA088 Adapter was the only one I could find at a nearby shopping center. It took some trial and error, but here’s how I managed to get it working under OS X.
First I downloaded the Magic Control driver from the MCT website:
http://www.mct.com.tw/driver.html
It appears this link is no longer valid.
Thanks to Mitch for finding the file, you can download a copy here.
Please note, this probably won’t work with newer Apple hardware, it was originally performed on a PPC PowerBook a few years ago.
Then I edited the plist file installed by the driver:
vi /System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist
Then I replaced the following 2 ID’s, by those found in System Profiler (under USB):
I then changed the permissions to 755 on all the files under (I compared this to the other drivers) the driver folder:
/System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext
Then, I ran kextload, and it worked:
sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext
kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/USBSerialDriver.kext loaded successfully
You should now see a new serial device appear in /dev:
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 2, 0 Dec 6 21:15 tty
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 9, 8 Dec 6 18:54 tty.Bluetooth-Modem
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 9, 6 Dec 6 18:54 tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 9, 2 Dec 6 21:16 tty.USB Serial
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 9, 0 Dec 6 18:54 tty.modem
crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 0 Dec 6 18:54 ttyp0
crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 1 Dec 6 21:50 ttyp1
You can now access the serial port via /dev/tty.USB Serial ala UNIX!
The Open Source Developers’ Conference (OSDC) is back! OSDC will showcase over 160 delegates, including lots of local talent along with speakers from interstate and overseas.
The conference will be held on Monday, December the 5th to Wednesday December the 7th, 2005 at Monash University’s Caulfield campus. If you can make it, I highly recommend attending. I encourage everyone to look over the timetable at http://osdc2005.cgpublisher.com/timetable.html. It’s going to be lots of fun!
Visit http://www.osdc.com.au for more information.
BSD Hacks
As an O’Reilly “Hacks” fan, I got myself a copy of BSD Hacks hoping to learn only a few tips and tricks. If that was the case it would have been worth it, however I greatly underestimated this title. Not only did I learn the tips and tricks one would expect from a “Hacks” book, but it also taught me a lot more about BSD than I expected. If you use BSD, get this book! It’s well worth it. 5 Stars.
I recently wrote an article for Macromedia’s The Edge newsletter briefly summarising the benefit of using alternative web browsers, in particular Firefox.
Far from a complete look at the importance of web standards, it will hopefully expose many web designers and developers to the many resources that the Internet has to offer. The article should also work towards getting more people to take a closer look at Firefox, which is a great browser for many reasons. If you’re interested, you can read the article online at Macromedia’s website.
I’ve just started taking bookings for a 1 day training course on the topic of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). I decided to offer this after several calls from people asking if I’d heard of anything in Melbourne I could recommend. The course will mainly cover SEO and the technologies used by various search engines, however I will also go over other methods of Internet marketing. The dates for 2005 are Saturday, 8th of October and Saturday, 10th of December. If you’re interested in getting more traffic to your site, head on over to SEOworkshop.com.au and check it out.
If the Windows XP Bootloader gets erased or corrupted, you can repair it without a complete reinstall. Below describes how to do this. More useful Windows tips can be found at WindowsInternals.com.
Disclaimer: Attempt this at your own risk, I assume no responsibility for any data lost.
Boot from the Windows XP CDROM in to the “Recovery” prompt. If you have not set an Administrator password, leave it blank. The Windows XP documentation (Help and Support) has a section on the Recovery Console if you’d like to learn more.
Then run:
bootcfg /rebuild
fixboot
fixmbr