Category Archives: linux admin

centos 4 and php 5.2.11 – htf do I do this?

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So I still have a centos 4 box running to host my blog.  However, as most people have probably found out it has a rather outdated php version.  So how do you get around this?

To get around this, you have several options:

1.  build all the binaries from scratch

2. upgrade to centos 5 (scary)

3.  find a nice person who has a set of repositories

4.  build all the binaries from scratch and make them rpms (im waaaay to lazy for this)

that nice person is jason at www.utterramblings.com who’s put up a repository and given instructions on his blog:

http://www.jasonlitka.com/yum-repository/

i should note that if you’re a little concerned about security or your company is, you should probably do #4, or find a hosting provider that does #4 (i believe rackspace does this for it’s users).  Jason seems like a pretty trust worthy guy (from his blog postings) and I dont really have any financial info on my servers.

UPDATE: one thing to note that you will update all your binaries, and not just php if you don’t configure the repo.  if you upgrade everything, then be aware that the apache conf will most likely need to be edited.

my love affair with rsync

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rsync –progress -r –exclude-from=./rsync_exclude.txt –delete -e ssh -p ./ user@host:path

- r= recursive

-exclude-from = exclude files txt file

–delete = deletes files that aren’t on target

-e = specify shell to use , ssh in this case

-p = preserve the permissions

a really easy way to deploy code to your web servers.  my rsync_exclude.txt usually includes my eclipse settings files and .svn

a really easy shell script would be to have this loop through your production servers to do an update.

try it out tell me what you think

You is the closer!

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So I worked on a quick one pager site (http://www.isthecloser.com) with a co-worker (Jason) from Tribal that merged two wav files to create a funny short wav clip.  Check it out.

To build the site, I used two technologies:

1) Flite – an open source text-to-speech system developed by CMU.  It was a low quality wav, but did the job well.  I also used Espeak, but the code looked like it required the server to a sound card installed, which mine does not.  So I switched over to flite instead.

2)  SOX – an open source sound exchange application.  I originally used the default one that came with CentOS 5, but it lacked the feature of sequencing the sounds together instead of merging them on top of each other.  So I uninstalled the default rpm and downloaded the code base and recompiled the latest version.

The code wasn’t too complicated, it was just figuring out how to get all the stuff to work together.  First get flite to spit out a wav:

/usr/local/bin/flite -t “‘ . $name . ‘” -o /tmp/closertemp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav’

the -t option is to use the text that’s passed in instead of a file

then I push it to sox:

/usr/local/bin/sox –combine concatenate /tmp/closertemp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav /tmp/TheCloser_1.wav /tmp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav’

the rand # is to make sure i always produce a unique file name for every request.

INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast : disabled for 5 minutes.

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Ok, some of you might be experience this issue when you create an image.  I’m not exactly sure why these errors happen.  I think they may have something to do with actual console screens? (someone correct me if im wrong, please!)

Anyway, what i did in my /etc/inittab is just shut them off intead of respawning them:

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:off:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:off:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:off:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:off:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:off:/sbin/mingetty tty6

I’d like to note that I’m not linux admin guru by any means and i have no idea wtf this will do later on.  It’s just helped me remove these annoying messages from my /var/log/messages.