Month: May 2007

Passwords Fixed and Crunch Time

I fixed the passwords last Friday. It turned out I had the apache2.conf looking for /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords when it should have been apache2. File transfer can now be accessed. Web stats are now accessible here for those interested.

In school news, I’m sure I’m not the only one starting to feel the finals squeeze. The year’s wrapping up and pressure is ramping up as we prepare for the tests… of DOOM. (Pat.) I’m watching my gaming time dwindle away, and it’s being replaced with time in which I’m putting off the studying I know I need to do. Writing that made me need to go study…

Ventrilo Startup and Password Problems

It seems that logging into a server-password-protected thing (such as file transfer) causes a 500 error. Redoing the passwords from scratch should fix this. Perhaps a file’s missing or there’s some configuration change. I’ll find it when I stop being lazy.

Anyways, I’m posting my crude-but-operational Ventrilio daemon startup script:

#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/vent
# Things here would be carried out every run, but
# we don't have any of those

# Now carry out commands
case "$1" in
	start)
	 echo "Starting ventrilo daemon..."
	 /home/steve/vent/ventrilo_srv -f/home/steve/vent/ventrilo_srv -d
	 ;;
	stop)
	 echo "Stoping ventrilo daemon..."
	 killall ventrilo_srv
	 ;;
	force-reload|restart)
	 sh $0 stop
	 sh $0 start
	 ;;
	*)
	 echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/vent {start|stop|force-reload|restart}"
	 exit 1
	 ;;
esac

exit 0


Stick that in /ect/init.d, make sure it’s chmod’d to 755, and run update-rc.d vent defaults.  It’ll start  a Ventrilo daemon (you’ll probably have to change the paths) which will also turn off upon system shutdown, halt, or reboot.


I’ve been trying to get a TeamSpeak server working well, and maybe it’s a combination of bad codec choices and running off a home DSL connection, but it sounds horrible and lags too. Maybe it would help if I RTFM. This weekend seems like it’ll be chock full of time.











StarCraft II!






Blizzard announced in South Korea today that StarCraft II is in development! There are many new units, especially for Protoss, and Terrans seem to have not gotten all too many upgrades, but the video did focus on Protoss.


Wikipedia article


Official Site


YouTube demonstration videos:


Part one, two, and three.





Published 
Categorized as Games 
 








Rain






Well, it’s raining.


Rain!


It’s raining badly enough that our eave troughs have overflowed, and the basement has started to leak, so we had to go downstairs and rush to pick all the paper off the floor in one of the back rooms. It’s worth it though. I like rain. All the cats cluster because something strange is happening, and there’s the calming drum of raindrops on the roof, accompanied by the occasional thunder clap or flash of lightning. Yay.





Published 
Categorized as Nature?! 
 








Server OS Change!






Well, I got fed up with my zombie-of-an-Ubuntu install. It was installed as Xubuntu 6.10, then upgraded to 7.04. Messy. So, I had some free time today and installed Debian GNU/Linux on it! I love Debian! Aside from some weirdness with not being able to install apache2, that was fixed by adding the line


deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian etch main contrib


to my /etc/apt/sources.list


Then it found apache2, and for some reason then wanted the CD to install it from. Weirdness. Oh well, it’s over now. That’s not the best of it – the server now has a startup time (from when I press the power button to when the cursor is blinking for me to login) of a bit under 36 seconds! That’s not to mention the shutdown time of around 5 seconds. For those of you who need help grasping how awesome this is, it means a complete hardware reboot can be accomplished in 40 seconds!


There is no data loss, all MySQL was backed up. The only loss I can think of is the changelog for cs_generic, but I could make it again by looking through all the files and seeing the changes if I wanted to.


I also created a startup script for Ventrilo, meaning everything I need is now started completely automatically. I used somewhat the help file here, and also found some syntax by Googling directly for Ventrilo startup scripts, but ended up writing my own. As much as it’s possible, it’s not all that long. I found it useful to try to do stuff just with sudo /etc/init.d/vent {command,} just for debugging the scripts. My initial (and only?) problem turned out to be that I had an underscore instead of a slash in my file path. It couldn’t find /home/steve/vent_ventrilo_srv so well, but /home/steve/vent/ventrilo_srv was fine. Wonder why. 😛


Anyways, aside from the usual urges to elope with SSH, the server install went flawlessly. Maybe I can publish a guide. That’s a summer-type thing though.













Gravity Games






I’ve found two interesting gravity-based games.


One is MindScape, which is a simple platformer, but if you walk up against a wall, or fall toward it, your gravity will orient as though that surface were the ground. It’s nifty. You can play MindScape here.


The second is the aptly-named Gravity Game. It, too, is kind of a platformer, and also uses gravity as a gameplay element, but is more of a puzzle game than MindScape, which isn’t too difficult. In the Gravity Game, you are a small circle, and your gravity, falling speed, ect change based on what color you are. You change your color by hitting color beacon-things, and your goal is to navigate these clever mazes to obtain these light-post things called Spindals. Gravity Game found here. (I’d recommend this one)





Published 
Categorized as Games 
 








Bleh. Microsoft.






I just bothered to install log-analyzing software, and it appears that the MSN web-crawling bots (for Microsoft’s search engine) is currently accounting for 52% of my site’s traffic! Seems like typical Microsoft: they can’t beat Google with quality, so they’ll just try and have their bots spam the crap out of every site everywhere. I password protected the logs, but I don’t see why I should as they’re information-only, no commands available. I could make the web stats available if people are interested.