I'm tired and stressed.

I need to find a new home to rent in a hurry and while house prices are tumbling in the UK at the moment, rents are not...

The wind, rain and bird song last night kept me awake.

Yesterday my email inbox was flooded with backscatter email from idiots.

Today's test of a new SAP application/interface isn't working, partially because I'm late, but also our external partner changed their SSH server without telling me!

Work is pure stress - we have a lot of the "Dead Sea" effect going on...

I need a holiday...!

I've now got my new home server running on Debian Lenny. I replaces my very old an very underpowered Sarge box. While I accept that Lenny is currently in testing and clearly isn't up to the standard of a stable release yet, there are quite a few things missing from Lenny that you would think by now would be in place...

Xen is not available yet, all the admin side stuff is in there, but there is no stock Xen host kernel yet - which is a bit of a pain as I had planned on using Xen on the new server. Instead I'm running kqemu and VirtualBox-ose instead which seem to work perfectly well, both working through the fake frame-buffer "Xvfb".

On my desktop system, also Lenny, nvidia drivers are not an option so I'm using the horribly sluggish xorg nv drivers. For most purposes it's okay, but I've had to disable my screen saver since switching from nvidia drivers to nv as the screen saver causes X to crash...

On the plus side I've managed to get NFSv4 working without kerberos support, it's actually dead easy to do and much faster than NVFv3 I think. Getting a kerberosised NFSv4 is proving more awkward...

Today I thought I'd give Xen a go on my AMD64/Lenny box. The snag is that while most of Xen 3.2 appears to be available there isn't a stock Debian Linux-Xen kernel available - or I'm miss reading how it all works.

Additionally my broken finger still hurts and and typing is a real pain...

At the weekend I started to set my new server up at home.

I thought I'd give NFSv4 a try, it seems to be the "new thing". So far it seems to work okay, better than the NFS3 user-space server of the Sarge era.

What I need to do next is getting Kerberos support running... It's all behind a firewall/router so I don't need security per se, but it's fun to learn how it's done.

In a VirtualBox VM I tried to install Debian Lenny on a system using LVM2 mirroring to see if I could get it to work.

Before I got to the partition drives option I switched to a shell and fdisked the two virtual drives and set them up as software raid for the boot partition and the rest of the drives as LVM containers. I then did a modprobe for the device mapper, a pvcreate, a vgcreate and two lvcreates with mirror option. In theory the LVM system should manage mirroring of the logical volumes it created. I did a varyon, then I laid down ext3 filesystems and mkswap and was even able to mount/umount them okay.

Back in the DI installer I then tried to use my new filesystems that had been created. The installer detected the filesystem layout and was happy to let me choose the mount mounts for boot, root and nominate the swap partition. I hit continue and I briefly saw some error message before it threw me back at the partition stage. I couldn't find the error message on any of the virtual consoles, or I'd had Googled for it.

Looks like I'll have to stick with the traditional software mirror first before applying the LVM on top.

At the end of last week my new home server arrived (one day late). It's a basic AMD64-X2 based unit from Digital Networks UK. I could have got a cheaper box from other people, but I wanted a box with a three year warranty, from a UK based firm and from someone openly supporting Linux.

It came running Debian Etch. I'm going to reinstall from scratch as I don't like the current disk layout. I'll create drive 1 as a half of a RAID mirror and drive 2 as the other half. I'll put a simple /boot on the first mirrored partition, and then install GRUB on both disks. The remaining mirror will then end up as the base for the LVM, from where everything else will run.

I'll probably create a basic 10Gig root partition, on the LVM, the question thereafter is if I go down the path of some form of visualisation tool (KVM/Xen/Qemu/VirtualBox etc etc)? and if so which service goes into which VM.

Externally accessible services:
* SSH server
Internally accessible services:
* DNS/DHCP Server
* Apache2 web server (development and testing purposes)
* dappd server (Firefly)
* Dovecot IMAPd server + Fetchmail from external sources
* CVS then what ever that gets migrated into (Subversion, Git ..?)
* NFS Server (to allow work on the Apache content and read/write audio files)

Putting the SSH server in it's own VM is the most obvious solution, it's not really making it that much more secure, but it's logical and I can see how to do it.

The other services are muddied, I'd need to have some form of centralised user admin to ensure that my UID is the same on all the boxes so I can modify files that are served by a given server process.

Learning to set up a server environment VM, a deployment/maintenance system and learning LDAP would be interesting, but it's a lot of effort for a home system.

My recent Poll about typefaces/fonts has set me off on a research course to find out more about fonts, and how Debian deals with them. I thought I knew how they worked but since changes in Debian from Sarge to Etch I'm not so sure any more.

On my boxes I have a number of font families installed automatically from the normal Debian repositories. I also have a few extra fonts from old Windows applications (Corel Draw) and Linux versions of commercial applications (Acrobat reader comes with some nice fonts for example).

It has been an interesting exercise trying to figure out how things work on a modern Defoma controlled system. I'm not yet convinced I've got it all working yet, as some fonts show up in some applications and some don't. So far I've figured out fonts physically go into one of two standard locations of a modern system plus you can add them in your home directory making three:

/usr/share/fonts
/usr/local/share/fonts
~/.fonts

In the olden days these would be manually added to your X11 configuration file. Since Xorg upgraded and got all modern, there is pretty much nothing in the X11 configuration file, it's all taken care of by other applications, fontconfig and Defoma in this case I believe.

First you make sure that fontconfig is correctly configured, in /etc/fonts there should be a fonts.conf file. Check to make sure it has the correct font locations from above in it.

Next Debian's Defoma should take care of everything, but it doesn't have hinting information for any locally installed files, so you may need to use the defoma-hints, defoma-font and defoma-reconfigure dance. This should give you a long list of symlinked font files in one location for most X applications to use.

Next you discover that some fonts don't show up where you expect them or with the name you expect. Some applications also maintain their own font details, e.g. OpenOffice.org and that needs tweaking. ARGH!!!!

Don't you just hate TV companies. They transmit unencrypted digital and analogue signals all over the place but when you want to get the data from their web site they insist on all sorts of DRM rubbish. So you can't download BBC data via iPlayer, you have to watch a grotty flash feed, it's not perfect but at least it works if you run/emulate a platform on which Macromedia Flash installs.

Yesterday I spotted something on ITV, I don't normally watch much TV and ITV least of all, but I thought it was fun in a cheesy sort of way. Turns out that like the Beeb you can watch on-line after the event, and like the BBC it's some evil Microsoft DRM infected rubbish. However unlike the BBC iPlayer which does to some extent limp along on Linux okay, the ITV rubbish must run on Windows and you can't use Firefox and even then (Win2K+IE6+MediaPlayer9) it refused to work.

If you get into bed with Microsoft you should expect to pick up some kind of infection, it's just highly annoying that the rest of us have suffer as well.

Lessons to media companies:

1) DRM doesn't work, it's snake oil stop wasting your money on it.

2) People are more likely to buy a DVD or some other branded item if they have seen the program: repeats/downloads help sales, they don't hinder them.

3) Open & public standards are their for a reason, it wouldn't be much use if every house-hold in the land had their own TV and electricity standards. Putting your content in someone's back box isn't smart and is even reliable...

Sun bought another open source company today, German virtualisation firm innotek was snapped up. Last week they bought MySQL, in the past they bought StarOffice, and the have at very long last opened up Java and most of Solaris.

I'm not quite sure what they are doing, or if they know what they are doing, but they do have a fat R&D budget and take engineers seriously. My only fear is that they don't need to own these firms to make a good distro - Canonical have come from no where and built their fame on the back of Debian - which will ultimately mean things wont have a happy ending.

With Oracle and Nokia also in spending mood, it's a good time to be a shareholder with plans for a new yacht. Even Microsoft are blundering about in their own incompetent way, trying to buy Yahoo! is an incredibly stupid thing for them to do.

If any large, rich but clueless multinational wants to offer me a few million, they can have a copy of my Perl modules and my time for a few nano seconds. Don't worry the code is GPL so you can always fork them if you think it's all an evil plan... ;-)

This is a great little audio/video player. It was a toss up between this and the 8GB iAudio 7. When I placed my order the iriver was GBP10 cheaper, though on Amazon today the iAudio is now cheaper. Both play Ogg files and can be easily controlled from Linux.

It is not perfect but it does most of the things I wanted and I'm glad I bought it.

The Good:
* Out of the box it plays Ogg Vorbis files beautifully. It also supports FLAC (great for classical/jazz) and a range of legacy formats like MP3.
* It works perfectly under Linux, just plug it in and you can sync your music with amarok without any problem.
* It takes MicroSD cards (which are dirt cheap) so you can easily have plug-in selections of music. Note it does not support higher capacity SDHC cards.
* It has a removable battery so you can replace it when it dies, rather than the whole device as is more often the case.

The Bad:
* Boot time is sluggish, it's not an instant on device like an old fashioned tape or CD walkman.
* It has a colour screen - it's too small to really watch videos but it is sufficiently large to drain the batteries and push the price up without adding any real value to the music.
* It's an FM radio not a more modern DAB radio. I don't know how good it is, as reception where I live is so terrible and it won't tune in to anything - not that other radios can either.
* Battery life isn't 22 hours, more like 12 hours. It's okay, but if you use it at work most of the day as I do, you need to charge it almost every day.

The Ugly:
* I can't get playlists to work properly, it is apparently possible but it's not documented in the manual or on the iriver web site and it's very hit and miss.
* If you select an album to add to the playlist it doesn't add the songs in a logical order (alphabetical, numerical or tag order) - which is a real pain when sequence matters (e.g. live recordings or classical music).
* You can flash upgrade the firmware, but this relies on using iriver software from a Windows PC.

It's not an iPod so this is either a very good or very bad thing...