For our software development we use Subversion - a powerful free tool for version control of files. Any file types are supported, even binary files. To be able to work with Subversion you have to setup a Subversion server. Then you can access the server from Subversion clients.

This blog entry shows one way to setup Subversion server on a Linux machine.

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Standard Kernel builds don’t support TPROXY ( 2.6.28 does now!).
For example if you use HaProxy as the load balancer then all of the backend servers see the traffic coming from the IP address of the load balancer. TPROXY allows you to make sure the backend servers see the true client IP address in the logs.

Ps. An easier alternative is inserting the clients ip in the x-forwarded-for header (option forwardfor).

For TPROXY to work you need three things:

1) TPROXY compiled into the linux kernel
2) TPROXY / Socket compiled into netfilter / iptables (due in v1.4.3?)
3) HaProxy compiled with the USE_LINUX_TPROXY option

The TPROXY patch for Linux Kernel 2.6.25.11 is here:
http://www.balabit.com/downloads/files/tproxy/tproxy-kernel-2.6.25-20080519-165031-1211208631.tar.bz2

The following is a guide how to install on Centos 5.1:
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A few months ago on my personal blog I wrote about the difficulty of installing CentOS on the Dell R200, owing to the SATA DVD drive used in the unit. The R200 is our unit of choice for our ClusterScale “Pegasys” product, so installing Linux distros on this server is a regular occurrence for us. Fortunately, we got hold of a Redhat driver image from Dell and we managed to load it on using a USB key. This is a simple case of typing linux dd at the installation command prompt, but note that you must copy the .img file onto the USB disk, rather than the files within the image itself.

Originally the problem was with CentOS 5.0, but as far as I know it’s still a problem with versions 5.1 and 5.2. Ubuntu installations do not seem to pose the same problem, so presumably they bundle SATA DVD drivers with the distro. I still can’t find this particular driver on the Dell site, so seems like a good idea to host it here too.

I’ve been toying with various flavors of laptops to use on my travels for a while (I’m not really a road warrior but my wife just can’t stop booking holidays).
Most of the time I get by with my trusty Blackberry for emails but sometimes you need a real computer… So I’ve always had to take a clunky laptop, normally dual boot Windows XP / Ubuntu (only need the XP as my current 3G card is somewhat flaky on Linux.).

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Standard Kernel builds of LVS (Linux Vitual Server) don’t have the ability to load balance traffic that is from the local node.
For example if you terminated some SSL traffic using stunnel or pound on the load balancer you then wouldn’t be able to forward that traffic to a backend real server through LVS.

First many thanks to Siim Põder for helping to port Carlos Lozano’s patch from 2.4 -> 2.6
In order to run an SSL reverse proxy on the same node that is running LVS
i.e.

External client —> pound:443 –> Local:443 —> IPVS:80 —> RealServer

The patch for Linux Kernel 2.6.25 is here:
http://www.loadbalancer.org/download/patches/ip_vs_locallvs.patch

The following is a guide how to install on Centos 5.1:
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I’m going on holiday next week to a villa in Spain with the extended family. I’ll take my Blackberry & laptop with Ubuntu and a 3G card because I’m one of those sad people who like to stay in touch with the office… But I’d also like to use the laptop for my 6 year old son to watch DVDs on the plane, now thats all very well but the DVD drains the battery pretty quick and the reliability is pretty awful. So I thought no problem I’ll just rip the DVDs into ogg movie files.

Now I haven’t used any DVDs in Hardy 64 bit (only 32bit which worked fine) but I instantly hit a problem, after being automatically prompted to install the illegal gstreamer library (nice feature that auto prompt) Totem refused to play ball with the DVD:

“An error occurred Could not read from resource”

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Open Source applications are even better in many ways, but that is another story ….

We started using an online web site chat service a while back, as it’s an invaluable sales and support tool for us. When we did a quick reckon of the market we quickly came across a problem. It was that old chestnut platform compatibility, we use a mixture of Macs, Linux (mainly Ubuntu) & a few sales guys on Windows.

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