coderchris.com

When you have a number of different servers to administer (yes administer - administrate is not a real word!), all across different platforms, switching between different client programs can get very tiresome very quickly.

As a result there are a few programs out there that act as all in one clients for Windows Remote Desktop connections, VNC Connections, SSH, Citrix, etc. These can be REALLY useful in this situation and can save a lot of time and hassle while in some cases reducing the chance of user error when switching between apps.

We worked with a commercial tool, iShadow, for about a year, for this and soon realised its utility but although it was commercial, it was clunky and very very temperamental when it came to storing/loosing passwords and connection profiles. So we set out to find an alternative.

Thankfully, Kelvin, our Technical Manager found MRemote, a free, stable and nice to use client which does the job very well. Yes, it is basically an interface on top of a lot of existing open source client programs which it loads as components, but why re-invent the wheel when these things in their own right work, and work well?

So without raving about it much more, if you manage a load of servers and want to simplify the process somewhat why not give MRemote a go. The only thing I think it's missing, from my point of view, is an interface to the NX Client which I use on some of my machines, and maybe database servers such as MySQL, but aside from that it's fantastic!

Popularity: 94% [?]

I have a dual boot Windows Vista / Linux Laptop and recently I needed to access the Linux partitions from within Windows to copy data between the operating systems.

So I did a bit of searching on the net and had trouble finding a tool/page describing how to do it with an LVM (Logical Volume Manager) partition, all tools seemed to just work with plain old ext2 or ext3 file systems with no mention of others.

This is a problem with at least CentOS 5.1 (Red Hat Enterprise) and probably all modern Linux distributions as there seems to be a move towards the LVM methodology for all operating systems - understandably so when you read what it's all about from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_volume_management

But then I noticed that Explore2FS from chrysocome.net actually also supports LVM2 as well as ext2 / ext3, and it works great!

All I had to do was download (at the time of writing) explore2fs 1.08beta9 extract it from the archive and run it - job done! I can get to my standard Linux files (and more actually) with ease from within windows through an explorer style interface. Just what I needed!

The guy(s) who developed Explore2FS are also working on another tool called Virtual Volumes but this really is a beta (at the time of writing) and I couldn't get this to work in a useful way what so ever BUT this should be a winner when it works too!

So now it just remains for me to setup ntfs support in CentOS 5.1 and I can go both ways - woohoo!

Popularity: 39% [?]

After having no end of issues with the proprietary flash media server 2 from Adobe I decided to give installing the Red5 open source version a go instead.

I have to say I was fairly impressed with just how easy it was to get running without having to do any of the faffing around that was required to get FMS2 running.

Here is the process in a nutshell:

1. Download and install the Java Development Kit (jdk) from here (I used the rpm version of JDK 6 Update 2): http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
2. Download and extract Apache ant from here: http://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.6.5-bin.tar.gz
3. Copy the extracted apache-ant-1.6.5 folder to /usr/local/ant
4. Setup the environment variables to include the path for java and ant by typing the following at the shell prompt:PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/usr/local/ant/bin
   export PATHThen also remember to add this to  /etc/profile so the settings don't get lost the next time you login
5. Download and extract the Red5 server from here: http://osflash.org/red5
    
6. cd to the Red5 directory you just extracted and type the following at the shell prompt to allow java to retrieve the files it needs from the net and compile and run the server as a background process (the module retrieval is automatic and only has to be done once):ant server & 
7. Then that's it it's running. In my case I needed to kill the ant/java processes running the server after the java modules were initially retrieved and the server built for the first time, but the second time it was fine even though it did take about 30 seconds to fully startup - this may just be a glitch on my system as I have a lot of other stuff also going on.
8. The final step is to test it. This can be done by moving the contents of the webapps/root/demos/ folder from the extracted Red5 directory to a webserver somewhere (I don't think it hast to be the same machine) and then viewing the list of demos in the index.html file.I started off by using the port tester to make sure the demo apps could actually connect to the server on the ports they were meant to (basically rtmp port 1935) and then moved onto testing the video streaming app and then tried a proper live broadcast through the server using the simpleBroadcaster app to two friends who were logged on using the simple subscriber app. All worked well especially as far as the video was concerned though the audio was a little crackly on my live broadcast - this could just be the quality of home connections however.The only last not is just a simple reminder that when running the test apps you'll need to specify the server they need to connect to - the apps are setup to access rtmp://localhost/[APP_NAME] but if you're not running these apps as a local user you will need to change localhost to the name or ip of the server Red5 is installed on

So far I'm quite happy with Red5 as a free (very important) alternative to FMS2, but should you be looking for a commercial product as this is not quite up your street (that is a cheaper than FMS2) then take a look at this instead: http://www.wowzamedia.com/index.html

Wowza only requires java to run and is like a very polished commercial version of the Red5 server (it was actually through installing Wowza that I worked out what to do with the web apps for Red5 - having had no previous experience in flash streaming other than literally installing FMS2) which has a very reasonable price tag in comparison to the cost of FMS2

Just before I go I just need to mention the map below - Red5 ask you to add yourself to their user map if you're using the software so I have - you can find me in Brighton, England

Popularity: 40% [?]

As usal with CentOS I can up against a few  problems installing tor from source on CentOS 5 this is basically a list of those issues with steps to overcome.

First of all after downloading tor-0.1.2.16 extracting the tarball and typing ./configure I got a message saying no linkable libevent was found.

I tried installing this via yum but without much luck so decided to install it from source too - however this was more difficult than it seemed as the current version is libevent-1.3d but tor-0.1.2.16 requires a feature of libevent that only exists in version 1.3a so after going back and installing all previous versions until I found the one that worked.

After that I was able to configure, make and make install tor without any trouble

Popularity: 12% [?]

In a previous post about how to install Flash Media Server 2 on CentOS 4.4 I came across a problem that required the installation of the libstdc++ compatability package to get the server to run as it is designed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0

The same problem applies to the installation of the x86 linux driver package for ATI Radion 9600 series cards (at least).

Basically, download and install of the driver goes pretty smoothly but when xorg is configured to use it (in particular for TV output it seems) the driver fails and the xserver crashes - the reason for this is that it requires /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5 and CentOS 5 provides version 6 of this library upwards.

So yet again we can solve this problem by running:

yum install compat-libstdc++-33-3.i386

To install the previous version of this library as part of the compatability package.

I wish software vendors would consider these upgrades to libraries when they release their programs - oh well, maybe one day.

Popularity: 5% [?]