phaq

Garage sale at the office: Good chance to grab on some (very) old hardware, like an APC 9221 PDU. Yes, it’s old (some 15 years or so), so surely not state of the art. But yet good enough to use in my home lab. Who could tell that there were some unforeseen issues waiting for me …
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There it finally is, The Phunsites Package Builder at http://pkgbuild.phunsites.net/.

Since my initial writings on FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi, I’ve always wanted to have a webservice, where I can just select the port I want and it’ll be packaged up in minutes.
Now, there it is. Fully automated, with a neat and (hopefully) easy to use webinterface.

Check it out. It’s free lemons! 😉

It’s not hard to install Icinga on FreeBSD, at least if you’re satisfied with default options.
Should you however require Icinga with IDOUtils and MySQL support, then you need to take additional steps.

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Years ago I wrote a small script to restore local default route after connecting the RAS VPN on Windows.

Now, I made up a similar script to do the same on OS X.
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Three days have passed since World IPv6 Day and we’re still here 😉
As of today, some content providers have decided to leave their IPv6 stack enabled on their services, which is generally a good thing.

Now, if you want to know if they site you’re visiting is running IPv4 or IPv6, I’d recommend installing the “sixornot” Firefox plugin, which reveals this at a glance.
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Yes, I know, OS X has already a “print to pdf” feature. This does however not work for those applications which don’t use the OS X native printing dialog, e.g. some Java apps.

This is where CUPS-PDF kicks in. It adds a virtual printer to the system, thus enabling non-native applications to print to a PDF as well.

Mission accomplished!

“Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.” (redmine.org)

Here’s my short primer on setting up Redmine on FreeBSD.
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So I work on OS X for a few years now, but until today that I didn’t really care about the underlying HFS+ file system.
But while working on a project using SVN, I got this unexpected error message:


gianpaolo-del-mattos-macbook-pro:trunk Gianpaolo$ svn update
svn: URL 'svn+ssh://...../webinterface/files/lib/webmin' of existing directory '...../webinterface/files/lib/Webmin' does not match expected URL 'svn+ssh://..../webinterface/files/lib/Webmin'

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DOS never dies! So don’t the boot floppies 😉

I have these since years and made them ready for web-download in 2001 already.
Now I gathered them back from my archives to put them aside to download at phunsites.net.

Maybe, these are of use to others to.
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For my company’s hard disk-based backup system I needed the ability to automount disk drives by their device name into a standard directory structure.

One possible approach would be to add some lines like these to fstab:

/dev/sda1       /mnt/sda1       ext3    defaults,noauto 0       0

This may be good enough in some cases, though it wasn’t sufficient for me, when there were dozens of device nodes which could get mounted eventually.

So I basically wanted something that would allow me to just access a directory, while the underlying disk was mounted automatically, then having it unmounted automatically if not in use, but still being dynamic in it’s nature so it would auto-adjust.
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