Monthly Archives: November 2002

The Top 5 Misconceptions About LindowsOS – you have to run it as root? gah! what security is that?!

The Register reports the first MS Stinger smartphone can’t dial up from your contact book! How did that get past the bug testers?

Ok, so you have to bring the site down for maintenance, and display a nice “closed” sign on the site to visitors.
Using Apache this is easy.
1. Create a directory, maintenance in the document root of the web server. Inside there put a .htaccess file with the following:

<limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</limit>

Create an index.html in this directory with whatever message you want to display to the user.

2. Create a .htaccess file in the document root of your server:

<limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from MYIPADDRESS
</limit>

Change MYIPADDRESS to the IP of the machine you access your site from.

3. Add the following to your httpd.conf, preferably in the virtual host of the server you’re taking down:

ErrorDocument 403 /maintenance/index.html

While you’re there, put the same in for 404 too.

Restart Apache and voila! You’re site is now under maintenance! Don’t forget to undo the above when you want visitors to get into the site!

Installing WinXP
I spent the last few days trying to get Windows XP onto a machine. It’s my first time installing XP, but I’m an old hand at installing older versions of Windows.
First of all, XP would die mysteriously with cryptic error messages about “DMA”, or “paged memory in unpaged something”, and IRQ errors which all came up at random. That had me stumped for a while, but I suspected a hardware fault as the machine is an old one (over 2 years old).
Sure enough, when I removed a SIMM, and my sound card, the errors went away. I’m going to throw the sound card back in, and the machine has enough memory to be usable.
That’s an error *any* installer on PC hardware would have trouble diagnosing so I won’t hold that against it.
I will not forgive the installer’s total lack of warnings or intelligence when dealing with partitions.
I was hoping to put Linux on the machine too, and I had 2 partitions setup for it ( linux and linux swap) and the WinXP installer let me choose the partition I wanted to install to. Unfortunately, the FAT partition I had prepared earlier was the third partition and I had forgotten that any bootable partition needs to be close to the MBR of the drive. (or in English, “it should have been the first partition”)
Any time I made this mistake while installing Linux, be it Red Hat, Mandrake or other modern distribution, the installer correctly warned me that the partition might be unbootable. Windows XP did not.
So, after copying lots of files onto that partition the machine rebooted. (only after several goes did I realise it wasn’t supposed to boot off the CD the second time.. it did only say “remove bootable floppys”, not CDs..)
When the machine booted off the harddrive, a nice, informative message, “NTLDR missing” popper up on the screen.
I even booted into DOS and checked the drive, and yes, the NTLDR file was there..
I gave up at this stage, and gave a friend, Gearoid, a ring. He reminded me of the partition problem.
After all that I made one big partition of the drive, went through the install and it worked. All that trouble because of non-existant error messages..
So, Linux is easier to install than Windows.

1. Linux warns the user about bad things.
2. Most Linux installers are graphical now with text alternatives
3. The Red Hat and Mandrake installers take care of interactive portions of the install right at the start. The WinXP install pauses at least twice so I couldn’t go out for a cup of coffee..
4. Linux installers only reboot once at the end, WinXP has to reboot at least twice. (my machine doesn’t reboot properly, it has to be turned off for up to 50 seconds before it’ll boot again..)

It’s a good thing Windows comes installed on machines, if people had to install it they’d be lost.

Irish Times Article – Department to store data on citizens for four years, so they’re going to store all the webpage URLs I download for 4 years? What about POST and GET requests? Will ISPs be given money by the government to do this? What about leased lines?
There’s a heated conversation going on in #linux on irc.linux.ie right now!

[ILUG] Mozilla dead? – As Rick points out AOL are free to take whatever they like out of the Mozilla codebase and put it into a propreitary product. He’s right, Mozilla won’t die, even if AOL goes away.

the wonders of zap – neat bookmarklet that’ll deactivate Flash on the current webpage.

Review Results: A Summary of our Desktop Linux Reviews
Problems at MandrakeClub.
Review of Xandros Desktop 1.0
Interview with Michael “Monty” Widenius, designer and lead programmer for the MySQL database.
John discusses PHP.
Jeremy used his laptop on an internal US flight? I asked if I could use my Gameboy Advance on our flight to Crete last summer and was told I couldn’t. Same went for other electronic gear such as CD players.
the ghosts of online travel information – good read. I’m heading out into traffic right now and a wireless connection to some traffic/transport organisation would help. Meanwhile, in the real world, the rest of us listen ot the traffic reports on the radio.

I love the session support in Galeon 🙂

Mozilla 1.2 is out. The Galeon RPMs won’t work with it so I’ll probably have to install Galeon from source..