Dev Team Assemble

One of the guys I work with told me about running the Microsoft Office Communicator in Linux.  Its actually quite easy to install.  Simply go to The Sipe Project website on sourceforge and follow the instructions.  For me it was dead easy.

1. Add a couple of sources to the /etc/apt/sources.list file ( deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aavelar/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main AND deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aavelar/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main)
2. Run an apt-get command to install it. sudo apt-get install pidgin-sipe

Once the install is complete you can now add Microsoft LCS/OCS as an account type in the list.  Simply fill in your creds and you are off to the races.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Microsoft Office Communicator, pidgin

Recently I acquired some server class hardware (Dell PowerEdge 2950)  and I thought, hey this is a great opportunity for me to setup a virtual environment at home so I can test out some beta products and do some tinkering with Linux. I have VMWare Workstation installed inside of Windows Vista machine at home and I have ubuntu 8.10 running in it and this seems to work ok but I have come across some issues with it that annoy me.

I was undecided on whether to install VMWare ESXi or Windows 2008 Hyper-V server. Based on the title of this article you can probably guess which route I took. I didn't decide to do this simply because I think Microsoft's virtualization platform is superior...I chose it simply because I use VMWare ESXi and ESX at work and was interested in seeing the capabilities of this free product in comparison.

After configuring the server with RAID 0 (faster and this is test) I popped the disk in and started installing. Truth be told the installation was a breeze...so much so in fact that I started the install, watched a soccer game and when I came back it was ready for me to login. I was a little confiused at first because at no point did I provide a username and password for the admin account but it prompted me at the login screen. Didn't take long to figure out it was Administrator/-blank- to login.

This all seemed a little too good to be true and I quickly found out that it was...after downloading and installing the Hyper-V Manager MMC into my vista machine I found I could not connect to the server. found this odd as the very purpose of this server is too allow connections. Turns out there were a few steps I had to do:

1. I had to add my user account (the vista one) to the server in order to pass my creds through.  I believe that once you have connected to it you can turn this off via the Hyper-V settings panel.
2. I had to turn off the server's firewall (I know, I know this is a bad thing but its a test box that will never see the outside world so...).  You can use the following command netsh firewall set opmode disable
3. I was able to connect to the server...BUT when I tried to create a machine I would get an error about Access Denied.  So I added myself to the Administrators group on the server.  At this point I can now use MMC to do most admin work on the server from my Vista client
4. I then started getting the following when trying to connect: Hyper-V Access Denied. Unable to establish communication between ‘SERVER’ and ‘CLIENT’ .  Funny thing is it would let me create a virtual machine but I could never seem to connect to it.  This one was quite confusing so I turned to my trusty friend Google to help me resolve this...I came across a blog post of one Adrian Dimcev here and it had the solution I was looking for.   Word for word heres the instructions from his site:
   • Click Start, Run, type DCOMCNFG. Click OK.
   • Expand Component Services, expand Computers. Right-click on My Computer and click on Properties.
   • Click on COM Security.
   • In the Access Permission area, click Edit Limits.
   • Select ANONYMOUS LOGON in the Group or User Name area. Then set the Permissions for ANONYMOUS LOGON to Allow for Remote Access.
5. After the previous breakthrough I got the following error (oh joy)  : The application encountered an error when attempting to change the state of the 'machinename'.  The hypervisor is not running....WHAT????? Ummmm yes it is......
   Ok turns out there is a very good reason for this as explained here in this Microsoft article.  All I had to do here was enable hardware-assisted virtualization in the BIOS.  After doing that it I was able to create my first machine in this environment == Ubuntu 9.

After reading a little further on the internet it seems that my setup at home (using a workgroup) is not the best way to do this and is partly to blame for some of mine and other peoples issues.  All in all the installation was a success but seems a little more confusing than installing ESXi.  Either way my environment is up and running.

Technorati Tags: hyper-v, Linux, server, virtualization, Windows

So I have been working on setting up a Linux box with PHP5 and mysql mostly just to fart around with but also because I like learning how to do these things. I was having a hell of a time getting PHP and mysql to install properly on my distro - ubuntu 8

I originally installed PHP using apt-get and then installed mysql doing the same but was having issues getting them to work...no big shocker considering I am still fairly new to Linux. Eventually I did the following to get everything working, well so far anyway

Here it is:

1. sudo tasksel install lamp-server - this installs the entire LAMP stack (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) and does most of the work for you (i like this)

2. sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin - configure it for apache2 (installed above) this helped me get rid of the Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_connect() I was getting...basically php was not configured to speak to mysql

3. I really cheated on this one because I was getting the following error Lost connection to MySQL server at ‘reading initial communication packet’, system error: 111 like any good linux noob I decided to google that up and came up with an article located here that worked like a charm. Here are the steps:

* sudo gedit /etc/mysql/my.conf - comment the line corresponding to ‘bind-address’
* sudo gedit config.inc.php - in the /etc/phpmyadmin folder
* add or edit a line $cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = ‘localhost’;
* restart mysql using sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

Anyway...HTH

Technorati Tags: Configuration, Development, Linux, mysql, PHP