Crouse – UID Zero

Ever play the old “telephone” game…tell the person to your right a secret and they
pass it along to the next guy, and so on and so forth until at the end of the line… the secret
doesn’t resemble what it started out to be.

I wonder how close too Judd’s vision Arch is now, and how close to his original philosophies this wiki page is now.
I’m sure they are both pretty close, but sometimes … I wonder about the validity of wiki’s being editable by everyone.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=The_Arch_Way&oldid=31

has “evolved” and turned into this

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way

Personally, I like the first one. KISS. Doesn’t “sugar coat” things, or add layers of confusion.

Apparently the multitude of edits to the first one were not enough either, so now we have

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way_v2.0

really???? C’mon. At what point does this just seem a bit silly.

mailit function

Here is a generic mail function I use with cron jobs or scripts that need to email information.
TIP: the context-type can be switched to sent html instead of plain text as well ;)


mailit ()
{
cat <<EOF | /usr/sbin/sendmail -f noreply -t
to:${sendto}
from:${from}
reply-to:${replyto}
subject: ${subject}
content-type: text/plain
${emailthis}
EOF
}


To use, set the variables first, then call the function ;) IE:


sento="someone@someemail.com"
from="sentfrom@someemail.com"
replyto="sentfrom@someemail.com"
subject="This is the email subject"
emailthis=`cat <<EOF
This is is the text
that is sent
in the body of the email.

mailit


Just installed Arch on a laptop I’d had for quite awhile… worked great. Not that I expected anything less :)

Dell D610, 2 Gigs Ram, 60 Gig Hard Drive

Shown running KDE/Konsole/Screen/Wicd

I love it………..it just works……… Arch Rulz :)

Seems like alot of people don’t know about archlinux.mobi. When I setup archlinux.us to give away 500 email accounts, I also setup archlinux.mobi for those same users. So if you have a mobile phone and want to access your @archlinux.us email account, just browse over to http://archlinux.mobi The archlinux.us email accounts are gmail based and google offers a mobile interface to those emails, and archlinux.mobi takes you directly to that interface. Convenient isn’t it ? :)

This is how I prefer to deal with stabilty issues for my Arch Server, ymmv, and you may do it differently.
I prefer not to rewrite/redo the entire system just to create a stable server.

1. Mirror Current Repo to a Local Repo
2. Use local Repo on test servers
3. If no issues, push local Repo to Stable Repo
4. Upgrade servers from Stable Repo
5. Pull Current Repo to local repo and start over with testing again.

————————–
| Current Internet Repos |
————————–
|
|
———————-
| Local Repo-Testing | —– Test Servers
———————-
|
|
——————–
| New Repo – Stable | –>>->>- Stable Servers
——————–

I haven’t ignored any packages for my setups, I upgrade kernels and do all upgrades, I just test them locally on 3 test server machines before I do my remote production server upgrades.
Has worked pretty well for me. You could ignore kernel upgrades I suppose and make the thing even more painless to do, but for me the whole point of running Arch is to be as close to the newest releases on all software. I don’t have time to create my own packages, and I never saw the need to duplicate the stuff that has already been done. For me, creating my own “stable” Arch server, has been 99% testing before updating the production server. So basically I create my own stable server repo through testing.

My setup works for me, but I’m really only tracking/working with (sshd openntpd mysqld httpd postfix proftpd) for the most part. As long as those are stable and issues dealt with/figured out, then the production server is usually happy. Archlinux.me downtime has been 100% hardware related, and not due to any problems with Arch itself. A very brief downtime while converting to php 5.3, but that was pretty minor.
I honestly haven’t looked at kernel26-lts ……. probably should I suppose, but the regular kernel has always worked pretty well.

Anyway, just thought I’d share how I do this for myself.

Yes boys and girls, the kernel update went smooth as glass.
You just gotta love Arch. The server was updated to the newest everything today, FEB 15, 2010.

edit: just edited post to reflect current kernel

This post isn’t really ArchLinux related, but every once in awhile, I do read things OTHER than Linux and Arch :)
I had a friend send me this link, and to be honest the first time I visited it, I sort of dismissed it. I ventured across it again
while browsing my bookmarks and clicked it. The webpage is worth a thousand emails from constituents, it speaks volumes about
the world we live in now.

So, Mr/Ms Politician — Bookmark this link and make it your homepage !
US DEBT CLOCK

Do your country a favor and don’t forget who has to pay this back when your wasting money you don’t really have.
bookmark this page while your at it ! http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

slapped this in my .bashrc file, thought i’d share

comp ()
{
diff -y -W 90 $1 $2
}

and if you use solaris

compare ()
{
gdiff -y -W 90 $1 $2
}

Veronica – Arch Linux 64-bit — Kernel 2.6.31.6-1
Archie/Jughead – Arch Linux 32-bit — Kernel 2.6.31.6-1
Betty/Reggie – Arch Linux (VBox) 32-bit — Kernel 2.6.31.6-1

Thought I’d share my current Arch machines.
I have several :)

Archie is the remote server at SevenL that runs this website.
2.80GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, 250GB Hard Drive.

Jughead is the counterpart to Archie that sits in my basement and runs several sites from my home connection.
Qty=2 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.60GHz, 4GB RAM, 640GB Hard Drive.

Veronica is my 64 bit system at home.
Qty=2 x86_64 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.60GHz, 3GB RAM, 640GB Hard Drive.

Betty is a virtualbox system on my work laptop. IT says I have to run windows on the laptop, but allows me to use Virtualbox… so, Arch in Vbox it is.
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz,1.5GB RAM, 60GB Hard Drive.

Reggie my work desktop system. Same as above, can’t install it as the primary OS, but can install it via Vbox.
1.5GB RAM, 60GB Hard Drive.

Assuming we aren’t talking about your girlfriend, how important is that silly little dot at the end of a sentence? I mean, it’s a period. A “.”, how important can a period be? Well, lets see, with the lack of a single solitary “.” in the right place ……….. 900,000+ internet sites were taken offline or otherwise affected ….. it was really that little dot, or rather lack thereof, that did all that damage. Not some fancy self replicating virus, no no no, it was the power of that singular little dot, it did ALL that, in the span of a a few hours, 900,000 websites were offline, and inaccessible…..along with the email for said sites. The nightmare, all caused by that littlest of guy on the keyboard, the period.

As strange as it sounds, it did happen. On October 13,
Read the rest of the story here…

The problem happened during planned maintenance of the .se domain. The .SE registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, which introduced an error to every single .se domain name.

We have spoken to a number of industry insiders and what happened is that when updating the data, the script did not add a terminating “.” to the DNS records in the .se zone. That trailing dot is necessary in the settings for DNS to understand that “.se” is the top-level domain. It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down.

Guess there really was something to that old saying, "Dot your I's and cross your T's.". Apparently they should have also added "and don't forget to use the period at the end.". The smallest guy on the keyboard has been vindicated, he IS important after all, and he just proved it. LOL.