1. Automatically load up ssh-agent and prepare your keys on login.

   OSX and most Linux desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, etc) have a “keyring” that stores system passwords and things for you in a relatively secure fashion. You unlock the keyring with a master password and you get access to stored passwords. ssh-agent can interact with these keyrings to automatically load up your ssh keys at login. You just unlock the keyring once, and your keys are all ready to go.

2. Use short names in your .ssh/config

   Sometimes you’ll be stuck working on servers with extremely long names. Or, worse yet, servers with no DNS name at all where you have to remember the IP address. In this case, you can use a host/hostname combination in your .ssh/config file to give you an easy to type name.

   host = shortname
   hostname = reallylong.nameplusdomain.com

   And, for bonus points, if your current login name doesn’t match the remote login name, you can add a user = remotename line. Now, instead of typing:
   ssh remotename@reallylong.nameplusdomain.com
   I can just do:
   ssh shortname

3. This last one is a potential security risk, but it can be handy when you’re deploying to a machine who’s host key changes regularly. I run into this all the time when preparing new release candidates of our Rails Boxcar images at work. I add stricthostkeychecking = no to my config. If I connect to the same server multiple times and it has a different host key (or no host key stored locally yet) I won’t have to manually approve it. Particularly handy in conjunction with Capistrano since cap will usually choke and exit with an error instead of prompting you with the “Add host key” message.

Companies like DreamHost have really redefined what one-click installations are all about, but I’m looking to take that further. Not just one-click hosting, but one-click virtual servers. Imagine filling out a form, submitting some billing info, and having a full-blown, ready to go virtual server available for your use (with root access to boot) within a few minutes.

With technologies like Xen allowing lightweight virtual machines, I’m hoping that we’ll soon be able to make this a reality. No more being confined to your $HOME, and trying to install software that isn’t supported by the hosting service within those confines. You’ll now be able to install software as it was MEANT to be installed, and just have it work.

With more and more Web 2.0 (is that cliché yet?) applications coming up, and with more and more developers designing said applications, it’ll be even more important to have an easy and reliable platform for hosting these applications. It’s obviously going to take some hard work and time to get it done, but I think it’ll really be a very positive step for the industry as a whole. Stay tuned for more about this.

Obviously, these are just my opinions and not the policy of Planet Argon, yadda, yadda. Same goes for any future work-related posts. But it’s a very exciting opportunity, and a very exciting time to be getting involved into this portion of the business.

So with a bit of digging, I found an ideal solution (that takes a little bit of work to set up). I use xvfb to provide a local X server that’s very lightweight, and then I run xmove inside it. I then start ogmrip connected to the xmove virtual server, and move it to my desktop to start it running. Once it’s started, I move it back to the xvfb server and get on with my work.

So the setup that I had to do to get this to work was as follows:

1. Configure my local X server (on thief) to accept TCP connections. In my case, this involved editing my ‘gdm.conf’ and setting DisallowTCP=false

2. Install xvfb and xmove on the remote server (encoder). apt-get install xmove xvfb

3. Start up xvfb. Using xvfb-run wasn’t working right for me, so I did it manually from the command line. Since I want to be able to refer to the output later I run it inside a screen session. So I do screen -S xvfb Xvfb :0 -screen 0 1024x768x24 The -S option to screen just gives it an easy name to use later when reconnecting. Note that using a bit depth greater than 24, while shown in the man page for xvfb as being valid, caused the startup to fail each time.

4. Once xvfb is running, I detach from the screen, and then do export DISPLAY=:0 Now we just need to create an .Xauthority file and start up xmove. So I do xauth generate encoder:0 . trusted followed by screen -S xmove xmove and then, once again, detaching from the screen once it’s started up ok.

5. Now it’s just a matter of updating DISPLAY one more time export DISPLAY=:1 (since :1 is the display that xmove uses by default) and starting up an application. Just for testing, I start up xterm and see nothing. (Which is ok, because it means it’s running in the xvfb server.)

6. Then it’s just a matter of doing xmovectrl -moveall thief:0 If this fails with an error you probably need to allow remote connections on the remote machine. So, in my example, I would open a terminal on thief and do xhost +encoder

If you’d like to have your applications open by default on your local machine, you can just pass the -server option to xmove. So, in the above example, instead of doing screen -S xmove xmove I’d do screen -S xmove xmove -server thief:0

And that’s it. With this setup I currently have ogmrip running on encoder and encoding a DVD, while I’m typing this on thief. Later, when I want to check the status of the rip I can connect to encoder, do another xmovectrl and off I go. Cool stuff!

Note: Before you go looking for “Server-based Azureus, Part 1″, know that it’s not there. It’s one of those things I meant to write but never quite got around to.

I’ve been using Azureus as my BitTorrent client of choice for a number of years. Since my primary desktop PC is a dual-boot machine running Azureus on it just wasn’t feasible anymore since I would have to keep restarting torrents. (Not to mention having a shared download directory and all that other mess.) So, instead, I set up a headless Azureus instance on a “server” (just a headless commodity PC) and I’ve been happily using it for a while.

I started out by using the the Swing Web UI but after having some Java-related problems (thanks Sun, for getting us that 64-bit Java plugin… oh, wait… nevermind! see note below) I decided to switch to using the HTML Web UI instead. I then just set up an autostart directory that’s accessible over the network and went to work. This has been working wonderfully for over a year now.

But earlier today, completely by accident, I stumped upon AzSMRC. AzSMRC is what I’ve always wanted to do with Azureus, but have never been able to. It creates an (almost) proper client-server setup with Azureus. You run the server wherever you want with the AzSMRC plugin, and then you use the AzSMRC client on any machine you happen to be using to connect to it. Best of all, the UI is almost as full-featured as the full-blown Azureus GUI. And, while this would have been much more useful about a year ago in my case, it allows a multi-user setup, where each user has his or her own autostart and incoming directories, thereby keeping everyone’s torrents separate.

There’s a great HOWTO on the Azureus Wiki that got me up and running in a matter of a few minutes. I’ve already tested the client on both a Windows and a Linux box and it works beautifully. Now I’ll finally be ready to set up part 1 of my “holy grail” of torrents on my desktop PC: a file type association with .torrent files that automatically adds them to the server. (Part 2, in case anyone has any ideas, is to automatically change the download directory for a torrent based on its category. I don’t believe this is possible yet, but I could be wrong.)

Java Note: Just in case you ended up here by Googling for 64-bit Java Linux Plugin or some such, there used to be an alternative. Blackdown Java had a 1.4 plugin that worked with 64-bit browsers. Unfortunately, it seems that they’ve retired. I’ve sent an email to the primary contact to see if it will still be possible to get the packages somewhere. If not, I will try to dig up my copy and make it available here for those who might need it.

But, and this is a big one, with all of these various ways to access our IM networks now, we’re leaving chat logs scattered everywhere with no way to effectively find stuff we need. Not only do you have to remember WHO you talked to, WHEN you talked to them, and WHICH network they were on, but you ALSO have to remember HOW you accessed that network so that you can find the log! It’s enough to drive a normal person insane! But, thankfully, it doesn’t have to be like that. I’ve spent the last 3 days pounding my head against my keyboard to finally come up with a solution that I find almost perfect (of course, YMMV).

I’ve been a big fan of Gmail for a while, and when they added Google Talk functionality right into the contact list I actually started using it. Shortly after that I started using an actual chat client to connect since having to use the web interface all the time drives me nuts. Then I noticed something cool. Gtalk not only logs your chats when you’re on gmail.com, it logs your chats no matter where you are! Now, privacy concerns aside, this was great news. I could chat from anywhere, using any client, and still access my entire chat history on Gmail. This was a fantastic feature! Unfortunately, out of 140+ IM contacts, 2 were on Google Talk… so this wasn’t all that great after all…

But wait! Google Talk uses the Jabber protocol… and Jabber allows IM gateways to other networks… hmm… I wonder…

So I present to you my Unified Messaging Platform™©®∞! You take one serving of GTalk, sprinkle in some Jabber-y goodness, fold in a handful of Jabber-to-other IM network gateways, bake for 35 minutes and voilà, pure messaging satisfaction!

I now use any chat client I want (including the Gmail web interface) and see all of my contacts from ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. I can talk to anyone on any network and, as far as they can tell, it’s still my same old username. But, in fact, my chats are being logged to my gmail account so I can always find them when I need them.

Now all of this talk is just fine, but it doesn’t help anyone but me, right? Well, in short order, I will be unveiling the grand design to allow anyone to simplify their messaging. But it’s definitely not going to fit into a single blog post so it’ll be an actual guide under “Geek Pages”. (Look to your right.)

Ok, no problem, I’ll just log in really quick and then do my comment. At least that’s what I’ve gotten spoiled with on the handful of sites that use OpenID. Sadly, the rest of the web doesn’t quite work like that…

Instead, I had to create a new username and wait for my activation email to come in. After it came in, it gave me a temporary password to use. So I went back to the site, logged in using my temporary password and then had to edit my account settings to set a more convenient password. After all of that, I can finally post a comment. Except that, now, I don’t really feel like posting a comment anymore. I’ve moved on to better things, like Zooomr, for example, which does support OpenID.

This isn’t really intended to pick on Simon in particular. Much like 95% of the rest of the web, his blog just hasn’t gotten onto the OpenID bandwagon just yet. Though since it is powered by Drupal, it seems like a great candidate for the OpenID plugin for Drupal.

For those who don’t know the first thing about OpenID, openid.net and openidenabled.com are good places to start. If you’re looking to get an OpenID there are a number of options out there. If you have a LiveJournal you already have an OpenID. It’s yourljname.livejournal.com. If you don’t use LJ or would just like a different one, I’d personally recommend myopenid.com as they’re a local Portland company and open source friendly. And no, they didn’t pay me to say that… unfortunately…

So far they’re only up to version 0.3.0, but by the looks of some of the screenshots on the site it’s already a full-fledged Windows system! Can we say WOW?! Depending on how the project gets handled in the future this could finally spell an end to Microsoft’s dominance in the desktop PC market. Even if Linux doesn’t manage to take over the desktop in the short term (though I hope it does), if ReactOS gets close enough to “real” Windows, it could become a serious competitor.

One of the interesting things to look at will be how well Windows Vista gets received by the business world. Large companies typically abhor any major updates to OS’s, so quite a few of them could very well end up evaluating ReactOS once XP starts to reach end-of-life status. The possbilities here are absolutely staggering. Now, granted, the project is still at a very early stage, and most of the above is pure wishful thinking on my part, but finally having a viable and accessible Free Software solution to Windows could be a huge deal. It could very well spell the beginning of the end for the traditional software licensing model. This will be a very interesting thing to watch.

Just edit your gdm.conf file (on a Debian system this is at /etc/gdm/gdm.conf, YMMV with other systems) and add (or change) a line in the [daemon] section that reads “KillInitClients=false”. Restart GDM and everything should work fine.

It’s still not QUITE done, but most of the stuff is finished. Rather than storing numbers in flat files, it’s all handled through a mysql database. It’s also storing basic page-access information in the database. Things like the referer and the time of access. I also whipped up a quick monitoring page to allow me to check all recent access to any pages that I have set up with the counter to let me see who’s linking to me, from where, etc. Wordpress has some similar functionality built in, but it’s more fun to write my own.

Once I get the code cleaned up and made a bit more portable I’ll probably put it up on here somewhere. Just copy three .php files onto your webserver, insert your database connection parameters into one of them, and off you go. Instant hit counter, logger, and reporter.