iPhone apps I've recently found and love.
From the "Where did that come from?" Dept., posted: 6-Aug-2011 23:45
How did I survive before finding these?
Viber (text & cell calling via data. Think Skype but easier to use)
HeyTell (treat the iPhone like an RT)
Songify (make yourself sing like a complete loser, but it's a real giggle)
MythRemote & RRgh (turns iPhone into MythTV remote controls over wifi)
yxplayer2 lite (stream recordings from MythTV backend to the iPhone)
Viber (text & cell calling via data. Think Skype but easier to use)
HeyTell (treat the iPhone like an RT)
Songify (make yourself sing like a complete loser, but it's a real giggle)
MythRemote & RRgh (turns iPhone into MythTV remote controls over wifi)
yxplayer2 lite (stream recordings from MythTV backend to the iPhone)
Life in the fast lane, not!
From the "What the hell was that?" Dept., posted: 6-Aug-2011 23:25
It's been a pretty strange year this year. The ground's been shaking a bit here in Canterbury, and I made the decision to leave the reseller game and jump the fence.
I spent 18 years as a systems engineer for a couple of resellers, nine at Axon and nine at ShapeIT.
Now I've joined Burnside High School as the 5th member of their IT Department. And I couldn't be happier!
What? I hear you say. Won't you get bored?
Never. BHS is the 3rd or 4th largest high school in NZ and has a network that's bigger and more complex than all my old customers added together. Around 1000 student machines & 200 odd staff machines on the network in one site. (And that's just BHS. Avonside Girls is here too....)
All the chunky goodness of my past customers without the travel! :)
I'll blog now and then on the projects that we're undertaking - I don't have time now to go into any detail, but here's a few that we've done in the last couple of months;
* Extend the wifi network so that all students can bring their home computers to school and 'do stuff' with them on the internet. All logged, proxied & authenticated without the students having to do anything but add a new wifi config to their computer.
* Set up driverless printing so that students can upload their document to a webpage, pick their appropriate printer and have whatever it is come out regardless of whatever device they're printing from yet still record & bill their printing.
* Replaced all 70 odd switches around the school with brand new ones doing gig to the desktop + link aggregation to the core. We can sustain 500mbps from one side of the campus to the other with the new gear in place.
Coming up;
* Win7 hardware agnostic rollout with automated application installation.
* Replacement of the student computer management & monitoring software to a different vendor's products
* Offsite backup & replication
* VoIP phone system implementation
Busy busy busy. Makes the weeks go very fast I must say.
I spent 18 years as a systems engineer for a couple of resellers, nine at Axon and nine at ShapeIT.
Now I've joined Burnside High School as the 5th member of their IT Department. And I couldn't be happier!
What? I hear you say. Won't you get bored?
Never. BHS is the 3rd or 4th largest high school in NZ and has a network that's bigger and more complex than all my old customers added together. Around 1000 student machines & 200 odd staff machines on the network in one site. (And that's just BHS. Avonside Girls is here too....)
All the chunky goodness of my past customers without the travel! :)
I'll blog now and then on the projects that we're undertaking - I don't have time now to go into any detail, but here's a few that we've done in the last couple of months;
* Extend the wifi network so that all students can bring their home computers to school and 'do stuff' with them on the internet. All logged, proxied & authenticated without the students having to do anything but add a new wifi config to their computer.
* Set up driverless printing so that students can upload their document to a webpage, pick their appropriate printer and have whatever it is come out regardless of whatever device they're printing from yet still record & bill their printing.
* Replaced all 70 odd switches around the school with brand new ones doing gig to the desktop + link aggregation to the core. We can sustain 500mbps from one side of the campus to the other with the new gear in place.
Coming up;
* Win7 hardware agnostic rollout with automated application installation.
* Replacement of the student computer management & monitoring software to a different vendor's products
* Offsite backup & replication
* VoIP phone system implementation
Busy busy busy. Makes the weeks go very fast I must say.
The silver lining in Disaster Recovery
From the "Where did that come from?" Dept., posted: 8-Mar-2011 22:19
As mentioned in my previous post, I've been flat out recovering a customer's datacentre after the Feb 22 earthquake.
Aside from the interruption to their business, the carnage that was & still is the Christchurch CBD and very stressed staff, there is a little IT silver lining for them.
We've been able to recover all their older servers (some physical, some virtual) to a new freaky-fast HP DL380 with lots and lots of SAS 15K drives in it. And this has been a golden opportunity to upgrade lots of their bits of software (latest AV client, latest anti-spam product, latest version of Citrix, etc etc) that have been on the cards for a while but they didn't have the time for downtime.
At the end of this they're going to have way faster servers, gigabit to the desktop & tons of free space on their servers.
As the horse has well and truly bolted we're going to close the gate this time with disk imaging backup software and take that to tape from a SAN instead of backing the servers themselves up to tape directly. Much faster to recover in the event of another disaster, and a lot less painful for the engineer trying to do it.
One cool thing I've found - VMWare ESX 4.1 update 1 can physically assign a PCIe SCSI card directly to a Windows Server 2000 VM - didn't know that could be done until I needed to access their new tape drive and found that I couldn't pass the tape drive directly through.
VMWare's probably been able to do this for a while, I just didn't know about it until now. I also didn't know that ESX 4 couldn't address a LUN bigger than 2TB - spent an hour or so wondering why my 2.045 TB array was showing up as 0 bytes in size by ESX when all the components were on the HCL. Just needed to resize the volume to just under 2TB and away it went. Lesson learnt.
Awesome.
Aside from the interruption to their business, the carnage that was & still is the Christchurch CBD and very stressed staff, there is a little IT silver lining for them.
We've been able to recover all their older servers (some physical, some virtual) to a new freaky-fast HP DL380 with lots and lots of SAS 15K drives in it. And this has been a golden opportunity to upgrade lots of their bits of software (latest AV client, latest anti-spam product, latest version of Citrix, etc etc) that have been on the cards for a while but they didn't have the time for downtime.
At the end of this they're going to have way faster servers, gigabit to the desktop & tons of free space on their servers.
As the horse has well and truly bolted we're going to close the gate this time with disk imaging backup software and take that to tape from a SAN instead of backing the servers themselves up to tape directly. Much faster to recover in the event of another disaster, and a lot less painful for the engineer trying to do it.
One cool thing I've found - VMWare ESX 4.1 update 1 can physically assign a PCIe SCSI card directly to a Windows Server 2000 VM - didn't know that could be done until I needed to access their new tape drive and found that I couldn't pass the tape drive directly through.
VMWare's probably been able to do this for a while, I just didn't know about it until now. I also didn't know that ESX 4 couldn't address a LUN bigger than 2TB - spent an hour or so wondering why my 2.045 TB array was showing up as 0 bytes in size by ESX when all the components were on the HCL. Just needed to resize the volume to just under 2TB and away it went. Lesson learnt.
Awesome.
Why I love Blackberry Enterprise Server
From the "What the hell was that?" Dept., posted: 8-Mar-2011 22:07
Today I found out something I didn't know about Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES).
I've been slowly recovering a customer's entire datacentre from backups - they are affected by the Christchurch quake in that their premises are in the 'going to get squashed by the Hotel Grand Chancellor' zone and so can't get at their servers. And the power's out. And their generator's out of gas.
One of the many is a Blackberry server, Blackberry Professional Server 4.1 to be exact.
I decided that instead of recovering it from backup I'd take the opportunity to install clean and go for BES Express 5 instead - you get a free 75 user license with BES-EXP and it's nice to use.
The only downside to a fresh installation is that I expected to have to reactivate each Blackberry phone so that the users can sync their mail/calendars/contacts etc again.
Well, imagine my surprise when after I finished the BES installation and started adding the users again I noticed that all the Blackberries that are turned on started to reconnect themselves without having to be told to.
Awesome! RIM's method of sync'ing a BB to their Exchange mailbox by divorcing the user account from the sync method has paid us back in spades - obviously RIM's datacenters must recognise the users' email address when the BES server came back up and went 'oh, hey, I know you from a while back. No, even though you've got a new server, I'll reconnect you fine'.
Beat that any other technology that needs to use Activesync / Intellisync etc. Ha!
I've been slowly recovering a customer's entire datacentre from backups - they are affected by the Christchurch quake in that their premises are in the 'going to get squashed by the Hotel Grand Chancellor' zone and so can't get at their servers. And the power's out. And their generator's out of gas.
One of the many is a Blackberry server, Blackberry Professional Server 4.1 to be exact.
I decided that instead of recovering it from backup I'd take the opportunity to install clean and go for BES Express 5 instead - you get a free 75 user license with BES-EXP and it's nice to use.
The only downside to a fresh installation is that I expected to have to reactivate each Blackberry phone so that the users can sync their mail/calendars/contacts etc again.
Well, imagine my surprise when after I finished the BES installation and started adding the users again I noticed that all the Blackberries that are turned on started to reconnect themselves without having to be told to.
Awesome! RIM's method of sync'ing a BB to their Exchange mailbox by divorcing the user account from the sync method has paid us back in spades - obviously RIM's datacenters must recognise the users' email address when the BES server came back up and went 'oh, hey, I know you from a while back. No, even though you've got a new server, I'll reconnect you fine'.
Beat that any other technology that needs to use Activesync / Intellisync etc. Ha!
Poor Aussie surfing for knockers at home - how to work around this yourself
From the "What the hell was that?" Dept., posted: 8-Feb-2011 15:36
I do so feel for the poor guy who got sacked for surfing for knockers on his work laptop at home, as reported in the media http://bit.ly/i13c6p for example.
As his company has in their wisdom implemented a very nice filtering & reporting policy coupled with a good enforceable computer use policy for staff (which he was well aware of) he should have known better.
What he should have done is create himself a Linux Live USB key and boot his laptop off that when at home - no filtering / inspecting software can catch that and report him, especially when he's at home doing whatever he wants on his own personal internet connection.
The company in question won't care either, as while the physical hardware doing the browsing may be theirs, the operating system (and relevant digital trail, logs, history etc) is not so they can effectively shrug their shoulders and take a 'don't ask don't tell' stance.
The easiest LiveUSB I've come across to go with is Linux Mint - to set one of these up;
1) Download the latest Linux Mint ISO from http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
2) Download the universal USB installer from http://www.pendrivelinux.com/
3) Insert a 4GB or 8GB usb stick you don't mind being overwritter into a usb socket
3) Run the installer (don't need to install it, just run what you download) and tell it which distro you are installing and where the ISO is. After that, tell it what usb drive you want to overwrite and how big a persistent root partition you want to create (hint: 8GB usb create a 4GB persistent drive) and then leave it to create your stick.
When it's finished (takes a while), reboot any machine and get it to boot from USB when your stick is plugged in.
Hey Presto - it's your PC now to customise and browse from. You can install anything you like from the repositories and it'll stay on the USB key unlike a live CD where it won't. Any WiFi profiles you create will stay put, too.
No tracking software installed on the normal OS of the machine you are using can see what you're doing - rootkit's perhaps excluded.
I'm guessing this guy's kicking himself, hindsight and all that.
As his company has in their wisdom implemented a very nice filtering & reporting policy coupled with a good enforceable computer use policy for staff (which he was well aware of) he should have known better.
What he should have done is create himself a Linux Live USB key and boot his laptop off that when at home - no filtering / inspecting software can catch that and report him, especially when he's at home doing whatever he wants on his own personal internet connection.
The company in question won't care either, as while the physical hardware doing the browsing may be theirs, the operating system (and relevant digital trail, logs, history etc) is not so they can effectively shrug their shoulders and take a 'don't ask don't tell' stance.
The easiest LiveUSB I've come across to go with is Linux Mint - to set one of these up;
1) Download the latest Linux Mint ISO from http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
2) Download the universal USB installer from http://www.pendrivelinux.com/
3) Insert a 4GB or 8GB usb stick you don't mind being overwritter into a usb socket
3) Run the installer (don't need to install it, just run what you download) and tell it which distro you are installing and where the ISO is. After that, tell it what usb drive you want to overwrite and how big a persistent root partition you want to create (hint: 8GB usb create a 4GB persistent drive) and then leave it to create your stick.
When it's finished (takes a while), reboot any machine and get it to boot from USB when your stick is plugged in.
Hey Presto - it's your PC now to customise and browse from. You can install anything you like from the repositories and it'll stay on the USB key unlike a live CD where it won't. Any WiFi profiles you create will stay put, too.
No tracking software installed on the normal OS of the machine you are using can see what you're doing - rootkit's perhaps excluded.
I'm guessing this guy's kicking himself, hindsight and all that.
Permalink to Poor Aussie surfing for knockers at home - how to work around this yourself
| Add a comment
(2 comments)
| Main Index
PING 3.0 Saves the day
From the "Where did that come from?" Dept., posted: 29-Dec-2010 21:45
It’s the week before Christmas and my Dad calls and describes what can only be the resulting mess that a head crash causes. A few phone calls ensue and he’s rebuilding his ageing desktop on a new drive & fresh install of XP. Minus some of his data.
The old drive won’t allow access via a USB adapter so it might be history, however Dad’s able to use a manufacturer supplied data recovery program to get most of his files back, except for his un-backed-up (of course) Outlook Express databases. There’s eight years of mail in that.
At this point some panic sets in as there are messages in that mail that are really important.
So Christmas arrives and I head home to visit the family and start the diagnosis of the failed drive & the recovered files.
I’ve always disliked Outlook Express, but never could really explain why. Still can’t pin it down, but I have another reason to use anything but it – there are no re-index or un-corrupt utils provided by Microsoft for this pig of a program. Anything that *might* work to recover mail from a corrupted .DBX file is a pay-for-it utility. Bah humbug.
So, several hours of Googling and lots of ‘try this and see if it works’ utilities later I’ve got a 1.1GB inbox.dbx that won’t show anything in it at all. My Father had managed to recover his Outlook Express folder & files via the HD recovery utility, but inbox.dbx got corrupted along the way.
Today’s bright idea – let’s try and resurrect the dead hard drive.
Chkdsk won’t work – it tried but fails pitifully when it hits the dead sector in either $INDEX or $MFT. So, if I can’t clean up the filesystem on the dead drive, maybe I can recover it on another drive…
Hmmm.
This is where my current favourite software-of-the-day comes in, PING 3.0 by windowsdream.com.
Plugged the failed drive into a USB IDE adapter & booted the PING CD on my notebook. Told PING to take an image to a folder on my notebook’s HD and a couple of hours later it had created 31GB of image parts on my laptop. PING bleated about the NTFS mft being all messed up, but was able to force-open the drive & do a sector backup regardless.
One shutdown, swap a 320GB drive onto the USB IDE adapter and a boot back up on the PING CD and I was able to recover the messed up 40GB partition to the new drive.
At this stage on bringing XP back up on my notebook my C: got upset and needed to autorun a chkdsk (minor point of concern but turned out to be nothing), however once my laptop had booted back up OK I was able to run a chkdsk on the recovered partition on the USB drive and it worked. LOTS and I mean LOTS of corruptions found, but the entire Outlook Express DB came back fine and imported into his newly rebuilt PC’s mail fine.
I’ve earned both the ‘Good Son’ badge and renewed my Geek Street Cred today.
Next task – teach Dad how to use NTBackup and USB drives.
Note: PING can also be used to upgrade to bigger hard drives - back up as normal from the boot CD, & restore to the new drive - if it's bigger PING will ask you if you wish to extend your NTFS partition and awya it goes.
PING can also back up a truecrypt encrypted drive. It can't identify *ANYTHING* inside the drive, but it will back it up sector-by-sector and recover it completely, including the intact truecrypt boot sector & prompt for password.
The old drive won’t allow access via a USB adapter so it might be history, however Dad’s able to use a manufacturer supplied data recovery program to get most of his files back, except for his un-backed-up (of course) Outlook Express databases. There’s eight years of mail in that.
At this point some panic sets in as there are messages in that mail that are really important.
So Christmas arrives and I head home to visit the family and start the diagnosis of the failed drive & the recovered files.
I’ve always disliked Outlook Express, but never could really explain why. Still can’t pin it down, but I have another reason to use anything but it – there are no re-index or un-corrupt utils provided by Microsoft for this pig of a program. Anything that *might* work to recover mail from a corrupted .DBX file is a pay-for-it utility. Bah humbug.
So, several hours of Googling and lots of ‘try this and see if it works’ utilities later I’ve got a 1.1GB inbox.dbx that won’t show anything in it at all. My Father had managed to recover his Outlook Express folder & files via the HD recovery utility, but inbox.dbx got corrupted along the way.
Today’s bright idea – let’s try and resurrect the dead hard drive.
Chkdsk won’t work – it tried but fails pitifully when it hits the dead sector in either $INDEX or $MFT. So, if I can’t clean up the filesystem on the dead drive, maybe I can recover it on another drive…
Hmmm.
This is where my current favourite software-of-the-day comes in, PING 3.0 by windowsdream.com.
Plugged the failed drive into a USB IDE adapter & booted the PING CD on my notebook. Told PING to take an image to a folder on my notebook’s HD and a couple of hours later it had created 31GB of image parts on my laptop. PING bleated about the NTFS mft being all messed up, but was able to force-open the drive & do a sector backup regardless.
One shutdown, swap a 320GB drive onto the USB IDE adapter and a boot back up on the PING CD and I was able to recover the messed up 40GB partition to the new drive.
At this stage on bringing XP back up on my notebook my C: got upset and needed to autorun a chkdsk (minor point of concern but turned out to be nothing), however once my laptop had booted back up OK I was able to run a chkdsk on the recovered partition on the USB drive and it worked. LOTS and I mean LOTS of corruptions found, but the entire Outlook Express DB came back fine and imported into his newly rebuilt PC’s mail fine.
I’ve earned both the ‘Good Son’ badge and renewed my Geek Street Cred today.
Next task – teach Dad how to use NTBackup and USB drives.
Note: PING can also be used to upgrade to bigger hard drives - back up as normal from the boot CD, & restore to the new drive - if it's bigger PING will ask you if you wish to extend your NTFS partition and awya it goes.
PING can also back up a truecrypt encrypted drive. It can't identify *ANYTHING* inside the drive, but it will back it up sector-by-sector and recover it completely, including the intact truecrypt boot sector & prompt for password.
Got a Lenovo PC that's suddenly dropped free disk space for no reason?
From the "What the hell was that?" Dept., posted: 22-Nov-2010 22:21
Today I finally solved something that's been annoying one of my customers for a while with their home PC.
They have a Lenovo Vista Business PC at home that all of a sudden has bugger all room free on it's 250GB drive. Windirstat shows that there's 135GB in use by 'system', but for the life of me I couldn't track it down. With Windows that is.
Well, booting to Linux Mint on a USB key and one du -h --max-depth=1 later and hey presto, RRbackup has 130GB of files & folder inside it.
Turns out that Lenovo's built-in, shipped-with, Recovery and Backup software will happily squirrel away copies of the contents of your C: into that folder and hide it from you. Don't think you can use the R&R software to delete the old backups though, if you manage to get your disk space too low. It doesn't like that.
One uninstallation of the offending software later + a reboot and we now have 155GB free on their PC.
Solved. Linux Live CD's (well USB images anyway) save the day.
They have a Lenovo Vista Business PC at home that all of a sudden has bugger all room free on it's 250GB drive. Windirstat shows that there's 135GB in use by 'system', but for the life of me I couldn't track it down. With Windows that is.
Well, booting to Linux Mint on a USB key and one du -h --max-depth=1 later and hey presto, RRbackup has 130GB of files & folder inside it.
Turns out that Lenovo's built-in, shipped-with, Recovery and Backup software will happily squirrel away copies of the contents of your C: into that folder and hide it from you. Don't think you can use the R&R software to delete the old backups though, if you manage to get your disk space too low. It doesn't like that.
One uninstallation of the offending software later + a reboot and we now have 155GB free on their PC.
Solved. Linux Live CD's (well USB images anyway) save the day.
Permalink to Got a Lenovo PC that's suddenly dropped free disk space for no reason?
| Add a comment
(4 comments)
| Main Index
Why I love my E71
From the "Where did that come from?" Dept., posted: 22-Nov-2010 16:24
I've got to say - I've had phones from all different manufacturers over the years ranging from Palm Pilots to Windows Mobiles to Nokias to Blackberrys and even the PITA's called Motorola's.
My current E71 however has to be the best I've ever had - with the caveat of the small keys & my fat fingers.
That aside, I upgraded my firmware last week and before I upgraded I was impressed with the GPS functionality and it's ability to have offline maps to take with you - no data required to use them.
Well, upgrading to the v5 firmware has decreased GPS lock from 1min on a good day to 10sec on a bad day. Very impressive. It's now using the cellsites as the stating location - I love this.
Combine this with the Ovi store (nowhere near as many apps as Android or iPhone) for apps & the built-in SIP client this is a great stylish & awesome battery life phone.
Since people like to bag Nokia now and then I thought I'd throw in my $.02 in their favour - I also run around with a Blackberry 8707v and it's nice to use too, (big keys that work well with my fat fingers), but the Nokia beats it hands down for functionality.
S60 may be old now, but Nokia put a lot of thought into it - they make good phones first, and face/twit/linked/mysp/social apps devices second.
Cheerio.
My current E71 however has to be the best I've ever had - with the caveat of the small keys & my fat fingers.
That aside, I upgraded my firmware last week and before I upgraded I was impressed with the GPS functionality and it's ability to have offline maps to take with you - no data required to use them.
Well, upgrading to the v5 firmware has decreased GPS lock from 1min on a good day to 10sec on a bad day. Very impressive. It's now using the cellsites as the stating location - I love this.
Combine this with the Ovi store (nowhere near as many apps as Android or iPhone) for apps & the built-in SIP client this is a great stylish & awesome battery life phone.
Since people like to bag Nokia now and then I thought I'd throw in my $.02 in their favour - I also run around with a Blackberry 8707v and it's nice to use too, (big keys that work well with my fat fingers), but the Nokia beats it hands down for functionality.
S60 may be old now, but Nokia put a lot of thought into it - they make good phones first, and face/twit/linked/mysp/social apps devices second.
Cheerio.
Queens Birthday Road Toll - Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
From the "Where did that come from?" Dept., posted: 7-Jun-2010 21:52
I just read on Stuff an article blathering that the Police are touting their new speed limit enforcement rules as "The Reason" for the lowest Queens Birthday road toll in ages. This is rubbish! The horrible weather that we've all had to put up with is the reason - most people have stayed home and off SH1. Also, considering the conditions, in-town driving has been slow & careful as well. As @freitasm said in one of his tweets - inattention is the cause of accidents, not the speed. Said inattention is usually related to booze/drugs, and driver tiredness. Speed doesn't usually come into it.
The media will say what they are told to say - the facts are unimportant.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
/rant
The media will say what they are told to say - the facts are unimportant.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
/rant
Permalink to Queens Birthday Road Toll - Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
| Add a comment
(18 comments)
| Main Index
Doing things with an RHEL PPC based server
From the "What the hell was that?" Dept., posted: 2-Apr-2010 20:57
Well, after fiddling around a lot I've got my PPC RHEL server working with the Transmission Bittorent client.
I've been wanting to do *something* with this noisy powerhungry box for a while and thought maybe I could get it to run one or other bittorrent client that can be web-managed.
Well, aside from Azureus there's no BT clients that should out-of-the-download run on a PPC based Linux box. And Azureus doesn't want to work on non-Sun based Java.
I did some googling during the week and found that Transmission should be able to be compiled under RHEL on pretty much anything as long as the prerequisite bits of software could be installed first.
So, one long yum command later and four small source tarballs downloaded I had all the bits ready to compile.
Of course, there was a snag. For some reason gcc refused to compile anything saying it couldn't create an executable. Turns out that even though glibc-devel and libc-devel were installed, they weren't the latest version. I ended up installing everything glibc* and libc* and after that all the bits that transmission needed prior to installation compiled fine, as did the transmission client.
So, I now have a four-core 2GB ram 300GB disk bittorrent appliance sounding a bit like a jet taking off sitting in my office. Webmin was able to add the transmission-daemon into the on-boot startup and any torrents I have loaded via the web interface to Transmission autostart sweetly.
It's a shame I can't leave this machine running overnight, but it'd severly impact the WAF around here. Especially as our bedroom is only 15 feet away from this monster. :|
Time to pack it up and put it away until the weather cools off. It does make a nice heater, though.
I've been wanting to do *something* with this noisy powerhungry box for a while and thought maybe I could get it to run one or other bittorrent client that can be web-managed.
Well, aside from Azureus there's no BT clients that should out-of-the-download run on a PPC based Linux box. And Azureus doesn't want to work on non-Sun based Java.
I did some googling during the week and found that Transmission should be able to be compiled under RHEL on pretty much anything as long as the prerequisite bits of software could be installed first.
So, one long yum command later and four small source tarballs downloaded I had all the bits ready to compile.
Of course, there was a snag. For some reason gcc refused to compile anything saying it couldn't create an executable. Turns out that even though glibc-devel and libc-devel were installed, they weren't the latest version. I ended up installing everything glibc* and libc* and after that all the bits that transmission needed prior to installation compiled fine, as did the transmission client.
So, I now have a four-core 2GB ram 300GB disk bittorrent appliance sounding a bit like a jet taking off sitting in my office. Webmin was able to add the transmission-daemon into the on-boot startup and any torrents I have loaded via the web interface to Transmission autostart sweetly.
It's a shame I can't leave this machine running overnight, but it'd severly impact the WAF around here. Especially as our bedroom is only 15 feet away from this monster. :|
Time to pack it up and put it away until the weather cools off. It does make a nice heater, though.
