dagus.org

I was really disappointed with the way programs were handling mp3 upload to my ipod. You know what i’m talking about, the synchronization shit and the one-computer-upload schema. But some days ago i found this nice tiny app called dopi, this app “Just works”. Dopi is really fast when uploading your music comparing it for example with gtkpod or banshee.

As i didn’t find dopi in the ubuntu repos, i installed it from source, here it’s the installation process:

cd
wget http://www.snorp.net/files/ipod-sharp/ipod-sharp-0.5.16.tar.gz
tar -xvzf ipod-sharp-0.5.16.tar.gz
cd ipod-sharp-0.5.16
sudo aptitude install mono-gac gtk-sharp2 libipoddevice-dev build-essential libxml-parser-perl
./configure
make
sudo make install

cd
wget http://www.snorp.net/files/dopi/dopi-0.3.2.tar.gz
tar -xvzf dopi-0.3.2.tar.gz
cd dopi-0.3.2
./configure
make
sudo make install
Note: i installed some extra apps and libs from ubuntu repos to satisfy the configure, but i’m not sure if those are all the libs and apps needed.

Dopi has been wrote in C# using mono, so maybe you can also make it work under windows.

Today i found a really cool app, it’s called democracy. The description in the page writes,

Stop squinting at tiny web video. Instead, download and watch all the best internet TV shows in one powerful application: any video RSS feed, video podcast, video blog, or BitTorrent file. Fullscreen, high resolution, 100% free and open source. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel
Guide.

Also it has about 600 free channels, this app is really cool, i only checked it a few mins, but it rocks hard and guess what? it uses RSS

The other day i was talking with the guys at work and i noticed that most of them doesn’t use RSS on a daily basis. And I thought “What a miserable Life”, “What an empty way of livin’” :P. OK, now serious, what do they have bellow his address bar on Firefox ?! tabs!!!!?? ouch. My use of RSS is really simple as i only take advantage of quite a few features of it, but please tell me that under your address bar is something similar to this:

Or at least tell me that you know what the orange thingy in your address bar is if you dont check this

How-To make a Load Balanced Server with VMWare and Hercules

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Prerequisites:

-> vmware player

-> A computer with about 256 MB of RAM

We are going to make a load balanced pair of LAMP installations. For this we are going to use virtual appliances that you can download from: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/index.html

I used Ubuntu Dapper for this tutorial and it’s really simple to install vmware-player here, just open a terminal and do: sudo aptitude install vmware-player. But there’s vmware for win also.

First Step – Downloading

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First of all download hercules from here: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/300

Now Download a LAMP installation, i used: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/465

Second Step – Configuring

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Uncompress Hercules one time and the LAMP installation twice, so you can have two LAMP servers

I have a dhcp server in my network thus, all the new boxes will grab IPs from there. Hercules came configured for not doing nat so it will grab an ip from my dhcp server, we will need to change something in the LAMP VMs configuration for them to have a real ip on my LAN.

Open lamp-1.0.0-x86.vmx with your favorite text editor and comment the following line:

ethernet0.connectionType = “nat”

note: Comments begin with “#”

If you have uncompresed two LAMP installations, you will need to modify both files.

Third Step – Starting VMs

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Login into the VMs with the following info:

LAMP1 and LAMP2:

User: root

Password: [Blank] (press enter)

Hercules:

User: root

Password: root

Now if you have a dhcp server do this to chek up IPs:

#ifconfig

My setup is:

LAMP1: 192.168.1.133

LAMP2: 192.168.1.137

Hercules: 192.168.1.105

As you can see in the image:

Fourth Step – Configuring Hercules

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Notice that if you open a web browser and put the hercules ip as address, a help page will appear as hercules also run a thttpd server.

Now let’s kill the default load balancer runing program:

#killall -9 pen

Now let’s start our configured load balancer program:

#pen -l pen.log -p pen.pid 192.168.1.105:8080 192.168.1.133:80 192.168.1.137:80

Fifth Step – Testing

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First go and test if your load balancer is working. Open a web browser and put the following as address :

http://192.168.1.105:8080

If webservers are working you should see apache welcome page. Now add more complexity cretate “test.php” file and put this code inside:

system(“ifconfig”);

?>

With this you will see the ip of the server that we are accessing. Put the file in /srv/www/html/ folder.

Let’s test that the load balancer it’s working. This load balancer has a particular thing, it remebers the host you accessed last so you will need to try from differents ips to see if it’s balancing the load. But you can do a simple test, try accessing the file you uploaded above.

When i do:

http://192.168.1.105:8080/test.php

It shows the ip of LAMP2(192.168.1.137) so i’ll shutdown webserver at LAMP2 with

#/etc/ini.d/httpd stop

Now, when i do:

http://192.168.1.105:8080/test.php

It shows LAMP1(192.168.1.133) YAY!