Automation Adventures

Google announced the latest development in their Google Apps product, Premier. It also updates the standard Google Apps with a new service, Docs and Spreadsheets.

I’ve set up our family’s domain (bruintjes.us) on Google Apps a couple of weeks ago, getting GMail to our domain, and some shared stuff thrown into the mix. It requires some fiddling with the Domain Name settings of your domain, but the Google help files are great.

The Google Apps Premier product adds bigger mailboxes (10GB), single sign-on support, Email gateway, Email whitelist, no ads displayed on Google services, and access to Google partners. It will be free until April 30th, after that it will be $50 per user per year.

I think Premier is a serious Windows Office contender. At a price of $50/user/year, if you have a small-medium business with 100 users, you can run a mail server, web server, calendar, and collaboration environment for $5000 per year, without having to buy any hardware or hire any support personnel (Google provides the support, and the hardware).

The only drawback is that your office is dead when your internet (or Google’s) goes down, but then again, some businesses depend so heavily on reliable internet connections that that is the case nowadays as well.

Well, our wiki server is up and running, and cyclops is humming along. However, it seems a little sluggish and it turns out Backup Exec is backing it up at the tremendous transfer rate of 2MB per minute….

That’s kind of slow. Backing up all of the server will take about 16 hours that way. And it is something in that machine, because the old test server (a HP XW4200) is reaching about 300+MB per minute in the same setup. I’m thinking that it is a network card issue, but I’m not sure what to do to solve it. So, I’ve started a thread in the Ubuntu forums, with little response so far. Basically I’m answering my own question…

If anyone has any experience with setting up Ubuntu or Debian or Linux on the Proliant M370, feel free to leave a comment…

Oh, and don’t add the option options e100 e100_speed_duplex=4 to /etc/modprobe.d/options – your machine will take forever to boot up to a prompt, and it will not enable the network card. Apparently that’s not a valid option for my card or driver…

As I mentioned before, we’ve set up an Ubuntu server with Apache, MySQL, and PHP, to run, amongst other things, a wiki (in our case DokuWiki). For some reason the main page was working fine, but any other pages were showing up as var_www_vhosts_wiki.medeco.com_whatever.

After some frustrating searches around the Web, I finally figured out what I did wrong. Here are the steps I took:

1. Set up Virtual Hosts in Apache:
2. Create the directory for your virtual domain under the vhosts directory
3. Create a file in /etc/apache2/sites-available with the same name as your virtual domain, containing the following:
   <VirtualHost wiki.medeco.com>
ServerName wiki.medeco.com
ServerAlias wiki
DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-error.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-access.log common
RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-rewrite.log
<Directory /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web>
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^_media/(.*) lib/exe/fetch.php?media=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^_detail/(.*) lib/exe/detail.php?media=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^$ doku.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) doku.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
4. Create a symbolic link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled, pointing to your virtual domain config file in sites-available:
   
   ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/wiki.medeco.com /etc/apache2/sites-enables/001-wiki.medeco.com
5. Touch your local DokuWiki config file:
   
   sudo touch /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web/conf/local.php
6. Restart Apache by entering
   
   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

A couple of weeks ago Adobe released Flash 9 for Linux. I’ve looked around the net a bit to find instructions for installing it in Ubuntu, but some were pretty obscure (download the .rpm, convert it to .deb with alien, install the .deb package, ignoring the errors, etc.), and most were still for the beta player.

Luckily Adobe made it very easy: the tar.gz package includes an installer, and you can either install it only for the current user, or system-wide.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Download the .tar.gz archive from here
2. Unpack it locally by issuing the command tar zxvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
3. Go to the newly created directory: cd install_flash_player_9_linux
4. The Readme.txt file is your best source of information, and you should check it in case anything has changed. Basically it tells you to run flashplayer-installer.
5. If you want to do a system-wide installation, run sudo ./flashplayer-installer. If you want to do an installation for the current user only, just use ./flashplayer-installer. I did a system-wide install – if you do it for current user only, I assume the prompts are similar, it just wants to know your local plugin directory.
6. The installer will tell you in which mode you are running (system-wide or current user), and then prompt you to either press CTRL-C to abort, or ENTER to continue
7. The only question asked for the system-wide installation is the directory that Firefox is installed in. Answer /usr/lib/firefox.
8. The installer will summarize what it will do, and then asks you to proceed. Type y.
9. You’re done! Tell the installer that you don’t want to do another install.

Pretty straightforward, and very similar to the original Flash Player 7 install that I did. So far it seems to be running fine!