Viktor Petersson.com

Yesterday I posted an article on how to monitor Apache and PostgreSQL with Monit. After setting that up I was amazed how simple and flexible Monit was, so I moved on with two more tasks: monitor Nginx and disk usage.
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Monit is a great little utility that monitors your daemons. If a daemon fails, Monit will start the daemon it will automatically restart the process. It comes in very handy if for web-servers, such as Apache.

For Red iGone we use Apache as the web-server, and PostgreSQL as the database. I wanted to configure Monit to keep an eye on these processes. As it turns out, setting up Monit was really straight-forward.

I tried this on Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04. If you try this on a different Ubuntu version (or other distribution), it is likely that you will need to make changes to apache.conf and postgresql.conf.
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If you are new to SEO, or just want to learn more about SEO, Matt Cutts and a few colleagues did a really good presentation on Google I/O where they went through several websites and reviewd them from an SEO perspective. The whole presentation is about an hour long, but well worth watching.

Last week I published a new version of my ZoneMinder Virtual Appliance. The virtual appliance is great if you want to easily deploy ZoneMinder without having to spend time setting it up. However, in some situations, you want to run ZoneMinder directly on the hardware. Perhaps you need better performance or simply need to capture video streams from V4L-devices.

Since I already spent the time getting it running, I thought I’d share the instructions for getting it running. It’s pretty straight forward, but there are a few minor things that took me some time to get around.
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Last week I launched ZoneMinder VA 0.2. Unfortunately there is an issue with the image that prevents it from loading properly into VMware Server 2. The root of the problem is actually an incompatibility issue between VMware Fusion and VMware Server, but that doesn’t matter. Fortunately the workaround is pretty simple.

- Delete any vmdk.lck directries
- Delete any vmem.lck directories
- Delete the quicklook-cache.png file
- Edit the .vmx file and set to FALSE entries for USB, SOUND and SERIAL.

I just recorded a screencast of Red iGone in action. The video is a bit rough (in particular the audio), but I hope it gets the message across. Enjoy.

In the last few weeks I had to set up a few new Linux servers. Since Ubuntu is my preferred Linux dist in recent years, 10.04 LTS was a natural choice.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is a great Linux distribution, with one exception: Grub. I really mean it. Grub is probably the worst boot loader to date. Is so bad that it could equally well be replaced with the following shell script:

echo ""
sleep 10

The better alternative to Grub is obviously Lilo. While it may be obsolete, poorly updated and 20 years old, it does one thing that Grub doesn’t: it works. Personally I couldn’t care less about fancy splash screens and all the bells and whistles that Grub can put on it’s repertoire. It’ doesn’t matter when it cannot boot the system. Please Ubuntu, just ditch Grub and make Lilo the default boot loader.

ZoneMinder is a great piece software. It is a very powerful video surveillance tool that can be configured with both IP cameras and regular cameras (via V4L). Unfortunately it is a bit difficult to get up and running with. A while back I needed to deploy ZoneMinder myself for a client. One thing lead to another, and I ended up with a fully working Virtual Machine for ZoneMinder. I uploaded it here just for fun, but it didn’t take long before I had was linked to from the official ZoneMinder project and the visitors started to pour in.

Today I just released version 0.2. It is using the latest LTS version of Ubuntu (10.04) and ZoneMinder 1.24.2. I’ve also reduced the size of the VM significantly. The new version is about 1GB extracted and around 350MB compressed.

For more information about the VM and how to download it, please visit this page.

A while back, WireLoad took over the management for the forum Google Community.com. I’ve been a member of the forum for a few years, and seen how it has gone from a lively forum to a spam-infested forum with hardly any active members. As the spam increased, all the serious and senior members went away.

I knew that the forum had potential. It used to generate a massive amount of traffic and has more than 40,000 registered members. We actually used to receive a significant amount of traffic from Google Community to YippieMove, but as the traffic dropped, so did the traffic coming from Google Community over to YippieMove.
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The hat is off to Nokia. They’ve managed to stay inside their cave in Finland while the rest of the world evolved. First they tried to sue Apple over some vague copyright infringement, while we all know that it was really just a desperate attempt to get some press. While Nokia once was an innovative cellphone manufacturer, I really don’t know what went wrong. Today Nokia did something remarkable though: They re-launched Danger’s Sidekick 2 under the name N8. Take a look at the similarities after the jump. Well done Nokia. The Sidekick 2 was released in 2002. Eight years later you release the same product. Astonishing.
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