Category: Computers

My home network consists of 4 computers- 2 desktops and 2 laptops.  My wife has one of each, both of which are more modern and both of which are Windows machines.  My two machines are the EEE and a desktop which I’ve pieced together from leftover parts from prior desktops.  It’s not a bad machine, it just doesn’t have the most up-to-date hardware.  Still, it’s good enough to make for a good server machine.  My most rewarding experience has been in the world of getting it running as a local mail server.

Last night, I removed the rsyslog, portmap, and logrotate packages to help speed up the boot process.  Now I get to see if broke anything.
I’ll probably remove more packages in an attempt to clean-up the little guy and gain some space.

My “main” computer nowadays is a hacked EeePC900 (I replaced the default Xandros OS with Debian).  I purchased it about a year ago and I’ve been really happy with it.  My only quibble is the same as everyone else- the keyboard.  The keyboard problem is exacerbated in my case because I’ve got above average size hands.  None the less, I have “learned” how to type with a fair amount of accuracy on the little guy.

While updating the Debian install, the new Grub2 was brought to my attention.  I gave it a shot and found that the EEE had no problems with the loader.  The only issue I an into was with the post install command.  After verifying that Grub2 worked on the computer, I thought I was supposed to type “update-from-grub-legacy.”  Unfortunately, the computer kept spitting back at me that the command was not found.  Frustrating.  Well, it took a little while(including several reboots, thinking that the command might get uncorked or something) until I realized that the command was actually “upgrade-from-grub-legacy.”  No problems since.

What’s the point of doing this stuff if you can’t personalize it some?

I just finished some minor mods to the theme, Arclite which is available at the WordPress site.  The nickel version is I moved the date, author and comment info to the bottom of the post.  Additionally, I added a time field in there as well.  I left the title where it was.  I had to monkey with the PHP code to accomplish these mods.  Pretty painless really.

Anyhow, I prefer the look of it this way.  Ideally, I’ll right justify the author and comment stuff, but how to do that eludes me for the moment.  I don’t really know PHP, but I know enough to figure out how to move “blocks” around anyway.  All part of the learning process…

Just finished updating the About page.  Figured I’d start trying to add some content here.  So, a little about the setup at this point.

This is a WordPress site.  At the time of this post, it exists only on my home LAN.  That LAN consists of several computers.  The one I’m composing this on is a WinXP Pro- this is the wife’s machine.  It’s location in the house makes it convenient to jump on and use.

My computer is a Debian Linux/Testing machine located in the basement.  I’ve got Apache running on it as well as a bunch of other server related software to make life simpler (and more interesting) computing wise.  What else is the server doing?  So glad you asked…

In addition to Apache/ WordPress, which you are currently using while reading this post, I’ve got Samba/ CUPS running, since we have a mixed computing environment here.  Samba is configured as a PDC in this case.  Further, the machine is running as a Dovecot IMAP server.  It fetches mail for me and the wife using fetchmail– what else?  Bogofilter is the spam filter of choice (tried SpamAssassin, wasn’t very effective for my email) along with ClamAV for virus scanning.  Oh, let’s not forget about Exim as the MTA.  I guess to round out the whole server theme, I’ve also installed mySQL and PHP, making this a full-on LAMP server.  Now, aren’t you glad you asked about the server?

And to give credit where it’s due, it’s a testament to the open-source community and Google that I’ve been able to get all this stuff up and running- reliably no less.  I wanted to link to the fellow who’s site had some extremely valuable posts regarding Apache and mySQL setup, unfortunately I can’t find him now.

So anyway- I already figure the site will evolve some, assuming I keep at it long enough.  Like all of the above, I’m doing this to learn a little bit.  That’s why I’m hosting this site on my LAN as opposed to going full-bore out on the web.

And with that, time to deal with the chil’ens…