I recently set up HA proxy on one of my Debian 6 (squeeze) servers.
There were a few rather annoying ‘gotchas’ that took a while to figure out, so I’m documenting them in case I ever have to set up HAproxy again.
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HAPROXY quick setup
May 27th, 2012Compile node.js on Centos Linux
May 26th, 2012This is a quick how to with the steps used to compile Node.js on Centos Linux.
These steps were successfully executed on Centos 6.2 x86 with node 0.6.18
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Compile Node.js on Debian and Ubuntu Linux
April 29th, 2012Building Node.js on Linux is fairly simple, as there are few dependencies. This is how I did it on Debain 6 (Squeeze). At the time of writing the current release of Node.js was 0.6.15. You’ll need to adjust the intructions below to reflect the version you’re building.
Update: I have also successfully tested these instructions with node.js 0.6.17 on Ubuntu 12.04.
Extracting SSH keys from a Java keystore (jks) file
September 23rd, 2011I needed to extract/generate a public ssh key from a java keystore so that the Java application could SFTP some files using public key authentication.
The problem was that I couldn’t find any way of converting an ssl public key to an ssh public key. It seems that although ssl and ssh private keys are compatible, the public keys are not. Read the rest of this entry »
Deleted root@localhost account in MySQL
July 2nd, 2011Like the fool I am, whilst messing about with user privileges in phpMyAdmin I managed to delete the root account. Suddenly I found myself with no access to any of my databases 
It took a while to figure out how to re-create the root@localhost user, so here’s how I did it. Read the rest of this entry »
K9COPY crashing on Ubuntu 10.10
March 27th, 2011I recently gave K9COPY a try, it’s supposed to be the Linux equivalent of DVDshrink for Windows. It certainly looked the part, but when I ran it with a disk I wanted to back up it ran for a short while and then crashed
Looking at the output of dmesg revealed that the disk was having trouble reading the encrypted disk:
[235.097347] sr 5:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Read of scrambled sector without authentication Read the rest of this entry »
Xen 4.1 released
March 25th, 2011Today saw the release of Xen 4.1. Major changes include support for greater than 255 CPUs, a new credit scheduler and CPU pools.
However, the most significant change to those that use Xen will be the new XL toolstack which replaces XM/XEND and will ultimately replace xcp’s xapi and libvirt. Read the rest of this entry »
ffmpeg freeview to pal-dvd audio fix
February 12th, 2011I was converting a TV show I’d to DVD format using ffmpeg, but the resulting file had the wrong audio channel. At first I thought it had no audio at all, but then I noticed it had a voice over occasionally explaining what was happening; “so-n-so has just entered the room…”.
It appears that ffmpeg had selected the wrong audio stream. For some reason, it had had selected the second audio stream instead of the first. The fix is simple enough, you can manually set the streams to use with the -map option. The command below works well for UK freeview. Read the rest of this entry »
XEN DOM0 support in mainline kernel at last!
February 3rd, 2011The XEN developers ad community have been trying fr years to get DOM0 support into the Linux mainline kernel. On January 5th 2011 it finally happened when Linux kernel 2.6.37 was released.
Okay, so it’s only basic support at this stage, but it does represent a significant milestone in the hypervisors history. Read the rest of this entry »
Installing Android 2.1 onto T-Mobile Pulse
November 20th, 2010This short guide takes you through the steps needed to install a custom Android 2.1 ROM onto the original T-Mobile Pulse.
The official T-Mobile Android 2.1 ROM was removed from T-Mobiles website because it had a few bugs, the worst of which meant that you’d lose the odd text message. However the latest ‘custom’ ROMS appear to have fixed these problems. Read the rest of this entry »