Linux

The Internet will go bust without DNS and the following is a guide to setting up your own DNS server to provide information about your domains and associated services. While this task can be accomplished very easily when using a hosting control panel, it is great fun to set things up on your own.

Unlike Top, its newer sibling - Htop is better in every way. It provides more detailed information, supports colours and is more configurable. Htop is available in the repositories of most distros. However, CentOS (and therefore, RHEL) is not one of them. While it it apparently available in the EPEL repositories, I could not find it for CentOS 4.9. In any event, what we have below are the (simple) steps to install it from the source packages:

I installed MySQL on my local server today and when I went to access it via mysql_secure_installation to set my root password etc., I ran into the following curious error:
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

While I initially thought that it was some kind of installation issue, after much scratching of pate, I realised that Occam was right and that I should be checking the simpler things first. Sure enough, after a quick check, I found that MySQL was not even running :/

I ran into the following warning while trying to install a package from the IUS third-party repository for CentOS:
warning: ius-release-1.0-6.ius.el5.noarch.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 9cd4953f.

This was caused because the IUS GPG key was not (correctly) installed. To fix, type:
sudo yum install yum-plugin-replace

This should prompt you to download and install the correct key. Once this is done, the installation of other packages should proceed smoothly.

I ran into this curious predicament earlier today when I found that the numeric keypad was not working in Kubuntu. Now, I have a KVM setup here and therefore could easily verify that the keyboard itself was working fine. This meant that the problem was a software issue.

Earlier today, I wanted to prefix a number of image files on a server with a 0. If this was on my desktop, I would have simply used a graphical tool such as the excellent Métamorphose. However, in this case, only a command-line was available. While Google threw up a number of bash scripts, I was curious to see if this could be done in a cleaner and more concise manner. Following the excellent reference to sed and more Google magicking, I arrived at

I performed a fresh install of Kubuntu's new distro - Lucid whatever - today. As per usual, there is no front-end to configure Samba and I had to do it the old-fashioned way. The following are steps that should walk you through a basic configuration on creating a share that can be accessed from Windows:

1. Install Samba using sudo aptitude install samba smbfs
2. Navigate to /etc/samba/

While trying to check the vhost configuration on my Kubuntu dev box, I had to run httpd -S. Of course, since ubuntu renamed httpd to apache (a bit like calling a Veyron a Bugatti), I had to run apache2 -S. This however led to the following error message:
apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER}

If you, like I was, are alarmed at the number of console-kit-daemon-s being listed by htop, calm yourself. It is a misrepresentation of threads as separate processes. To get a better view of what's going on, select "Setup" in htop and under "Display options", check the "Tree view" and "Display threads in a different colour" boxes and save the changes.

Compiling KTorrent 3.3 RC1 on Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic with KDE 4.3:

Update 1: This works with 3.3 final as well.
Update 2: This works with 4.0 beta1 as well.

1. Install cmake and related tools:
   sudo apt-get install cmake automoc build-essential gettext
2. Install other required libraries:
   sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev kdebase-workspace-dev kdepimlibs5-dev python-kde4 libboost-dev libtag1-dev libqca2-dev libgmp3-dev