I didn’t see it until now, but VirtualBox version 1.6 was released a couple of days ago. You can get it on Sun’s website. Interestingly, there is already a binary for Fedora 9 but I think there is a typo in the drop box…”Fedora 9 AMD” is probably the 64-Bit version.
Changelog:
The new Sun livery
Solaris and Mac versions no longer in beta
Guest Additions for Solaris
Seamless windowing for Solaris and Linux guests
SATA support for up to 32 hard disks per VM (first product in the industry to do SATA!)
PAE support for guests (memory model required by some server OSes)
I can see that you are lazy, and I know how hard it is to type an user name and password each time you want to login via SSH on a server.
Today, we are going to learn how to configure your computer and a server to allow automatic SSH authentications using your public RSA key. Less work = More fun!
Configuration on your computer:
As your normal user, open a terminal and type ssh-keygen
It will ask you some questions, you can simply press enter to acknowledge the default choices. You don’t need to enter a password here if you don’t want to be asked for it at each login on the server, it’s not a security flaw. The output should be something like that:
[Steven@HP6710 ~]$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/Steven/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/Steven/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/Steven/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The important thing is that you have 2 new files in your user/.ssh directory.
id_rsa is your private key, you should NEVER give it away.
id_rsa.pub on the other side is your public key, the one that you can give away.
Configuration on the server:
As the user you wish to be logged in (let’s say root), also run the ssh-keygen command to create the /root/.ssh directory. Now go to your /root/.ssh directory and create a text file named authorized_keys2. Copy the content of your computer’s public key file (id_rsa.pub on HP6710) to this file and save it.
Job done, now you can run ssh root@server from your computer and it will log you in automagically
I’m using wireless home routers and Access Points since a very long time, I remember when I paid up to 200€ for an early Linksys 802.11b Access Point. The only problem I have with them, is that they always die horribly after a while. Let’s go back in my router-love history…I had the following products:
2x Linksys WAP11: the power supply died and burned the whole PCB. They both lasted 1 year.
Linksys WAP54G: the power supply also died after a long agony during which the wireless connection was less and less reliable. It lasted 2 years.
D-Link DI-824VUP+: the wireless connection was never reliable and the supposed PPTP VPN-server function never worked. They stopped to support the product roughly 6 months after it was released. The biggest piece of shit I ever had. It’s still in operation as a purely Ethernet router.
D-Link DI-524: the wireless part of the router died today. It lasted 2 years. It had a very short signal range too.
Today, I replaced the DI-524 with a brand new ZyXEL NBG334W and god is it better! Simply by looking at the Web interface and the manual, you can tell that this product is in an other class. It’s a real configuration interface, with options you need and you can also access it via Telnet. Forget Linksys’ or D-Link’s Playmobile interface. The signal strength and range are good too.
ZyXEL always had a good reputation, we used a lot of their products at work but I never tried their home products. At around 30€, it’s not that expensive. Note the nice “Guest WLAN” function.
As I said last week, I packaged the PHP MDB2 driver for PostgreSQL as an RPM for Fedora 8 and 9. Actually, this is my first self-made RPM ever and I’m quite happy with it.
I learned my way trough SPEC files and rpmbuild thanks to this excellent documentation on the wiki and of course by looking at other SPEC files…I love Open Source for that!
If I don’t detect any bugs, I’ll try to push this package in Fedora and become an active contributor
Ah, my homemade Hackergotchi was also accepted. I now have a face on the Planet. Yes, it’s scary.
Sometimes, you may wonder why you should buy “expensive” hardware instead of el-cheapo-made-in-China stuff. Well, here is an example why the certifications and safety norms are important, and why you should pay a couple of € more to get a better quality:
This is what happens to a Heden PSX-A830 power supply under normal load. 2 of these PSU’s were tested with the same result. It is simply DANGEROUS, it should die by itself and not plunge your whole house in the dark. You should know that Heden is a purely commercial brand designed by Chinese manufacturers to sell cheap power supplies in Europe under a single name.
This is part of a french article from a friend (Doc Teraboule) at Canard PC.
As announced by Jay Estabrook on the axp-list, there is a 2.6.24 kernel available for the Fedora 8 Alpha port (along with some other updates). You may not see these new files if you run a yum update because of yum’s cache, the directory structure on the update server has apparently been changed as far as I can tell. So simply run a yum clean all and voilà, you can install the new kernel.
Once it is installed, you need to tell aboot (the secondary boot loader for Linux/Alpha, we don’t have Grub) how to boot on the new kernel, edit you /etc/aboot.conf file and add a new configuration:
The first number is an unique identifier used by the SRM. For example, you can boot on the 2.6.23 kernel with boot dka0 -fl “1″ and on the 2.6.24 kernel with boot dka0 -fl “0″ (if your disk is recognized as DKA0 by the SRM). The second number represents the partition the kernel resides on, BSD-style. man aboot.conf is your friend if you are lost!
Did you ever wonder how to write portable PHP code that works on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL or SQLite? Then what you need is the Pear MDB2 package. It’s an abstraction layer between your PHP code and the database. It’s really not hard to learn and use! Of course, you have to use “standard” SQL queries that are common to all databases in your PHP code
In Fedora 8/9, you can install the MDB2 package with yum install php-pear-MDB2. This is the base package, now you need to install a driver for your database. To access MySQL it’s yum install php-pear-Driver-mysqli.
Note that on the screenshot above (PackageKit in F9), there are only 2 MySQL drivers available as RPM’s in Fedora. This little choice defeats the purpose of the abstraction layer, so I’m probably going to create driver packages for the other databases (or at least PostgreSQL) next week and try to push them into Fedora.
The screenshot says it all: the Fedora 8 port to the Alpha architecture works fine My old EV56 533MHz is happier than ever! The distribution was installed in 32 minutes, and around 50 updates were available via yum directly after the install. All my hardware works, you can see it on my smolt profile.
The Fedora 9 Preview ISO’s are available! If you want to help Fedora, try it and report bugs…the final version should come out around mid-May as you can see on the schedule page. Remember that this build is only meant for testing purpose, not for a stable workstation.
Today, there was good news on the Linux AXP mailing list: the Fedora 8-based Linux distribution is alive! This is time to reinstall my Alpha EV56 I guess, and playing with it is a lot of fun
Note that Gnome and Java is buggy, so you are strongly encouraged to use KDE.
