]> AlphaBlog http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog Adventures on the OpenBSD Alpha en-us aorchid 2006-12-04T09:32:49-08:00 http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2006/12/04/T09_14_27/ long time, no blog 2006-12-04T09:14:27-08:00 aorchid Alpha Working
Either way, we have moved clear across the country. The old Alpha with OBSD on it survived the move. I managed to copy over the mail from the machine for backup, but didn't need it in the end. Got here and turned on the machine and, with a little encouragement, the machine booted in OBSD again like nothing had happened. I still have trouble getting it to boot into OBSD once in a while, like when I have to shut it down for the incompetent electricians. We now have the Alpha running in our back 'Library', so I don't hear it or get the heat from it. Sure would be nice to replace it with something more efficient to help reduce electrical usage and our bill!

I've moved away from OBSD and Mac, using Solaris 10 at work. This started because of the effective hype over Solaris and because I liked the idea of being able to use my computer from anywhere, the thin client idea . Of course I have yet to set that up, and in fact, I cannot connect via that mechanism from the Mac! Eventually I will get it working, probably first the Global Desktop solution from them. It has been a painful transition that I will get into later in more detail. Suffice to say that a lot of time was lost and Solaris is much more complicated than OBSD. More later. ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2006/03/30/T13_09_25/ The Move 2006-03-30T13:09:25-08:00 aorchid
The new house is absolutely wonderful. We are having a good time trying to get the yard together. It was just dirt when we moved in and it is now mostly weeds with some plants that we have scattered about. In the backyard we have many fruit trees: mexican lime, lemon (large), persimmon, orange, grapefruit, mandarin tangerine and pommegranite. I also bought another coffee tree about 2.5 feet tall and planted it in the ground. We await the return of our larger coffee tree and kaffir lime tree from their guardian who is less than eager to give them up now. The front yard we are going all native. So far we have the parkway planted with salvia, redbud bush, spicebush, low-growing manzanita, lilac verbana and one other I can't remember. The front yard has a refugio manzanita and growing poppy seeds. We have placed a few annuals out there for color as well. We have lots of grasses for out there, a valley oak, salvia and buckwheat waiting to go in the ground. Lots to do!

The OBSD server survived the trip across the country and is plugging away. No updates to it, though I did manage to back-up the mail store before we left Baltimore. The WebDAV server is working better on the new faster DSL that we have here. Just came in handy last night as I needed some large files from someone across the country. The only problem is the power consumption of the server. I would really like to get something new with less power consumption, but we can't afford that now. ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2005/10/10/T19_39_30/ IMAP Glory 2005-10-10T19:39:30-08:00 aorchid ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2005/10/10/T19_14_37/ WebDav, Finally 2005-10-10T19:14:37-08:00 aorchid WebDav work on here. Then suddenly, I just modified one thing (who knows what really) and it works! I did move the Dav enabled directory out of htdocs. That may have been the final straw or requirement. Working well now. I just would like to have symlinks from my home directory work in it, or anywhere for that matter. Still haven't figured that out, despite, once again, reading everything I can on the subject and apparently following the same directions. I even made it require SSL. Very nice little bit there. I have backed-up my httpd.conf file for when I accidentally erase everything, or have I??

My next goal will be to add a subdirectory that can allow other users more limited access. I think I know how to do that. I think this may be helpful to allow others to visit my time schedule or other bits of information, especially for MVI to see which SAEs have been reviewed.

I also managed to get blosxom to work on this machine. The only problem is that I don't know how to make the page look pretty. I thought I would move away from NB and toward the perl-based blosxom, as it appeared to be more flexible and such with all the extensions. Plus, on my other NB blog anyway, the pictures no longer work and I go double posts after I upgraded to 3.2.3. Not a very happy camper I was. Another issue I am now noting, is that loading pages in a web browser from the home server anywhere outside of the home does not often work. I think it is because our DSL connection with Verizon is so slow that pages timeout. This happened when I put all our most recent pictures for our house sale on our server. I could load them at home, but others in California were not able to do so. I had to put them back up on our .Mac server. To bad, because that uses space we have to pay for and the server is slower to work with than mine here, considering uploading and such, since I have to use webdav to interact with .Mac. I'm hoping that with a faster DSL connection in LA, I can use our webserver to do more than hold files on a webdav server. Ah! the other interesting thing is that I can use cadaver to connect to the webdav server here and successfully download items, but a browser will not download items from our webdav server unless you are in the house. Odd. But I am happy enough with how it is working at the moment. The IMAP server is working wonderfully. I just need to back it up very soon. :) ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2005/07/25/T13_13_56/ Mail Again! 2005-07-25T13:13:56-08:00 aorchid newaliases command. I thought, incorrectly, that just rebooting, which I've had to do several times (once it just died, unsure why), forced sendmail to re-read the configuration file, but not. Anyway, no working. Yea!!!! :)]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2005/07/24/T17_07_08/ Updated NB 2005-07-24T17:07:08-08:00 aorchid
I first tried to move over to blosxom on this machine. But after way too many hours of working to get perl going in the chroot environment, I gave up. I have followed the instructions on the web, but they are wrong. I'm sorry, but they are. It just doesn't work. I then tried to install perl in /var/www to get kwiki going (at least), but this failed with a no more memory error, or something similar. Enough for one day.

I was thinking about getting a new AMD machine from Sun to run the solaris 10 OS on, but after this repeated failures here on the OpenBSD machine, I'm strongly considering continuing with mac as my desktop machine. It pretty much just works. Not always, but mostly. I've spent weeks trying to get cyrus-imapd installed and the perl thing. I finally have cyrus-imapd working (yea!!! :) ), but webdav still fails. I am just so tired of having a slow OS, but maybe that is preferable wasting many hours trying to get things working. Anyway, I really have wasted far too much time on this now. I may keep blosxom on this machine to get a picture blog going. The only use of this would be to reduce the size of our space on the .Mac server, but it may not be worth it. Blosxom will run as a static server, but this is no better than using nb as I am doing now, really.

The webdav thing really gets me. It was working. Now it won't work no matter what I do. Even though I have the same configuration. Very odd and very frustrating. ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2005/03/28/T16_29_04/ Mail! 2005-03-28T16:29:04-08:00 aorchid
When I first set-up the computer, I was getting mail, but it was always with the address return error for no known address. So, I played around with some of the configuration files and lost mail output all together for some time. So, I finally added an MX record for the machine at dyndns.org and listed several of their nameservers in the new /etc/resolv.conf file. Still nothing. I had inserted search xochitlfilms.org at the beginning of the same file, based upon recommendations in the AbsoluteOpenBSD book. So, after some helpful hints on the newbies list, I realized that maybe I needed to remove this first line from the file, put the airport router down as a nameserver and list a universal nameserver, one that wasn't just for dyndns.org. Well, this worked! :) If I could just get the mod_perl to work correctly I'd be happy.]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2005/03/21/T13_19_29/ Mail delivery issue 2005-03-21T13:19:29-08:00 aorchid To the newbies list I went and the consensus was that you do need this file. So I set it up again. Still nothing. Then I realized that I needed to add the airport address to the /etc/hosts file. This at least gave me an internet connection. :) Weeks later though, I haven't had much time to look into this further until today. The daily and weekly scripts are still being run, but I am not getting any mail. Sending mail from the command line doesn't work either, I get an error that it cannot resolve the host of the external mail address. I thought then that I needed to add another nameserver to my /etc/resolv.conf file. I did this, but still nothing. Oh well. Much more work to go, plus still can't get the mod_perl and mod_cgi to work, but maybe I can try more today.]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2005/02/09/T18_54_52/ Fortunes! 2005-02-09T18:54:52-08:00 aorchid NanoBlogger Help fortune, only fortunes. See! Easy mistake. So I put the following into my fortunes.sh file
fortune 50% fortune 50% limerick
Clearly, this didn't work. Before I realized my mistake however, I thought that the code suggested on the mailing list was wrong. But I don't think so. We shall see! :P

Still can't get the symlink to my user directories to work with the Apache server. Frustrating. :cry:

Aargh! I had modified the suggested fortune.sh code, thinking that was the problem. It does work, but receive complaint from nanoblogger as it is running the script. So let's see what happens now. :)]]> http://homepage.mac.com/xochitl/alphablog/archives/2005/02/08/T21_47_26/ Fortunes 2005-02-08T21:47:26-08:00 aorchid NanoBlogger Help fortune.sh file as someone on the NB mailing list suggested, basically taking out all the sed. We'll see!

OK. It didn't work. There may have been a typo on the suggested instructions that were posted. I have now modified the file, so we'll see what happens now. There was no fortune output with the above post. ;)]]>