Category: Other Opensource

Upgrades and Fixes

31 May
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Other Opensource, Technical, Virtualization

Spent the weekend upgrading my home systems and fixing some of the hosting issues I have. This includes

  • Upgrading a temp OpenSolaris installation to the latest Solaris Express build.
  • Upgrading the VirtualBox instances to the latest build
  • Upgrading the Ubuntu instances to the latest build
  • Upgrading PHP on a particular box to 5.2.10
  • Reviewing the MySQL databases used at the hosting provider and cleaning up staging and test instances that are no longer used.
  • Played a bit with hardware for compatibility and drivers – Onboard NICs vs. PCI NIC cards, setting SATA controllers to ahci mode, …

Still have a laundry list with me, but that is a good progress.

 

Upgrades to VirtualBox 4.x

02 Apr
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Other Opensource, Solaris/Unix, Virtualization

I have been running VirtualBox 3.x on my personal Solaris Desktop as well as my work laptop. About 2-3 weeks ago, I upgraded to VirtualBox 4.x on my work laptop. Upgrade was simple and easy. I have seen considerable improvement of the way the VM Screens are handled in 4.x. The fullscreen mode is really fullscreen now and the Host Key functionality improved tremendously.

All these two weeks, I was thinking in the back of my mind about the Solaris version of the same upgrade, for my personal desktop. Didn’t spend much time on that till this morning though. This morning, downloaded VirtualBox 4.0.4 for Solaris and installed it. The installation was fairly straight forward: Uninstall it from the global zone and reinstall the new package. One notable fact though: The older version, during the uninstallation process, never checked if the application is running in the first place. It simply uninstalled, while my VirtualBox is running and a couple of VMs are in suspended state. During the install of the new version, it checked for the presence of running processes and aborted installation with the right error message. I had to stop the application and then reattempt the installation.

Having OpenSolaris 2009-06 (build 111b) installed on my system, I got a warning during installation about USB support for guests (which requires build 124 or later I guess). Other than that, the upgrade on OpenSolaris went on simply fine and I am back with all my VMs. I also installed a new instance of Ubuntu server on VirtualBox, just to test out the functionality. It is working fine (able to identify all the .vdis, grab all the previously uploaded disk images, etc.

 

Debugging and Fixing WordPress 3.1 issues

08 Mar
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Blogging, Other Opensource, Technical

As I indicated in one of the posts earlier this week, I had issues using the visual editor after upgrading to WordPress 3.1. I also noticed some other minor issues in the last few weeks, irrespective of the upgrade. All these problems are resolved once I forced my webserver (hosted on a known service provider) to use PHP5.

Here is the configuration I added to my .htaccess file at the root of the blog directory.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

After upgrading to PHP5, here are the issues that are fixed.

  • Visual editor issues like icons not displaying are fixed now.
  • Now I am able to purge even 500 spam comments in one single shot. Earlier, this used to take 2-3 iterations.
  • Automated upgrade of plugins is lot smoother now. Earlier, plugin upgrades used to fail if they are long running.

Now the WordPress admin panel response is smooth and all the plugins/themes are up-to-date, with little or no effort.

 

 

WordPress Upgraded

07 Mar
Raju Alluri 1 Comment Blogging, Other Opensource, Technical

Upgraded my blog software to latest version of WordPress a few days ago. All the plugins worked fine and the upgrade is as smooth as it can be. However, I noticed that the visual editor for blog posts started behaving weird. None of the icons would appear and most of the additional functionality is lost. Suspecting upgrade glitches, I installed a fresh instance of wordpress on a unpublished URL and even that installation suffered the same issue.  There is a long thread on the topic at wordpress. Hope I can get this fixed soon. For now, I am a HTML specialist again ;-).

 

Unix, Reboots and System Administration

04 Mar
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Other Opensource, Solaris/Unix, Technical, Virtualization

Paul Venezia has written three good articles in the last few days and they are really worth reading. First, he talks about the nine traits of the Veteran Unix Admin, that summarized a bunch of characteristics of seasoned Unix admins. The ninth trait led to a bigger discussion on rebooting and how Unix boxes are commonly perceived as not to be rebooted right away. Then that opened up a much bigger discussion on the simplicity of rebooting in light of virtualization. Based on that, he wrote a nice article on the decline and fall of System Administration.

All these articles are good read for budding system administrators: not only the articles, but also the comments and discussion threads on these topics. They help understand various perspectives on these classic problems and help you make a judgment call based on the specific deployment and operational scenario you are working within. Have a nice time reading!

Content Management Tests

13 Feb
Raju Alluri 0 Comment Blogging, Other Opensource, Technical

I need to give a facelift to a few personal sites. So I tried out these content management systems for a couple of hours.

Each one seems to be good in their own ways, but WordPress is definitely the simplest and easiest publishing platform.

My criteria is very simple: I need an opensource publishing platform that shouldn’t take lot of writing time, website resources and learning time to publish. Initial setup time of a few hours is acceptable. All three of these seem to be good based on that criteria.