Computers: September 2005 Archives

Without a doubt, the most frequently asked question that I receive when I evangelize blogging and RSS at work is "What is the best RSS reader for Windows?". Unfortunately for me, I do not have a good answer to this question, as all but stopped using Windows on a daily basis.

But, since 99.8% of EDS employees use Windows, and because I really want to promote blogging and RSS, I would like to have an answer to this question. So, with Google and Virtual PC by my side, I am going to list some popular Windows-based RSS readers in this post. Hopefully, this list, combined with the comments, will help me to arrive at an answer.

When I google for "best windows rss reader", I found the following:

• Directory of the Best RSS readers
  
• Wikipedia: free Windows RSS readers / commercial Windows RSS readers
  
• RSS Info (blogspace.com)
  
• RSS Quickstart Guide (Lockergnome)
  

Based upon the above research, it looks like the top RSS readers for Windows are SharpReader, FeedReader, and FeedDemon.

Well, I was hoping to be able to try a few of these out on Virtual PC, but I have spent an hour patching and installing the .NET 1.1 runtime on Windows 2000. So, I ask the Internet -- which of these readers is worthy of my recommendation?

-Andy.

In all of my years using Solaris, I have always thought that their solution for rotating the core system log files was a joke. The "utility" (I use the term loosely) that Solaris used to ship with was called newsyslog. It was an incredibly simplistic shell script, and wasn't really re-usable, in terms of being able to rotate log files other than /var/adm/messages and /var/log/syslog.

For years, the Open Source UNIXes have included utilities for managing the system log files based upon a flexible configuration file. FreeBSD, for example, includes the newsyslog utility, which reads from newsyslog.conf, in order to decide which log files to rotate, and how they should be rotated. It's great, and I have thought for years that Solaris should have something like this too.

So, it was a pleasant surprise today that when I went to setup log rotation for Apache running on a Solaris 10 server at work, I found that Sun has finally beefed up this part of Solaris. Gone is the weak Solaris newsyslog, and in its place, we welcome logadm. It looks like this utility became available in Solaris 9, but it was news to me until today.

This logadm thing seems pretty nice -- it is super-flexible, in that it took care of all of the quirks around rotating Apache log files. One odd thing about logadm is that every time it runs, it re-writes the config file (/etc/logadm.conf for those of you keeping score at home) in place. For example, here are the two configuration lines that I wrote today:

# -C -> keep 5 old versions around
# -e -> e-mail errors to areitz@aops-eds.com
# -p -> rotate the file every day
# -z -> compress the .1 - .5 files using gzip. this means we don't need to
#       sleep before gzip.
# -a -> gracefully restart apache after rotation
/var/apache/logs/access_log -C 5 -P 'Fri Sep 16 00:24:48 2005' -a \
   '/usr/apache/bin/apachectl graceful' -e areitz@aops-eds.com -p 1d -z 1 \
   -R '/usr/local/bin/analog'
/var/apache/logs/error_log -C 5 -P 'Fri Sep 16 00:24:48 2005' -a \
   '/usr/apache/bin/apachectl graceful' -e areitz@aops-eds.com -p 1d -z 1 \
   -R '/usr/local/bin/analog'

The comments should explain some of the options. But the whole '-P' flag was added by logadm, after it ran. This flag tells logadm when it last successfully rotated the log file, so that it knows when it should rotate again. Kindof a nifty hack for performing that function, if you ask me.

-Andy.

It was our sysadmin's last day with EDS today, and as a result, I now have a systems administration aspect to my job. This means that lately I have noodling around with Sun hardware and software more than I usually do. What follows is the story of how I spent a good chunk of my afternoon:

Due to our local Jumpstart process not properly partitioning the two disks in the E220R that I was trying to build today, I was forced to take matters into my own hands, and fix things manually. Since I'm a hacker at heart, this didn't pose too much of a problem for me. What did pose a problem, however, is getting the E220R box into a position where I could perform surgery on the partition table. Even in single user mode, Solaris refused to unmount /var. Thus, I was forced to find some way to get a non-local version of Solaris running, so that I could perform my surgery.

To my knowledge, Sun doesn't ship any sort of Solaris recovery CD, not even on Solaris 10. Doing a quick Google, I found a few brave souls who have posted instructions for creating your own Solaris recovery CD, but I have things to do, and don't have the time necessary to craft my own CD from scratch. The trick that I know is to boot off of the Solaris install CD, and then break the install process before it gets very far. This can usually net you some sort of shell, which is usually mostly-sortof functional.

When I tried to do this today with a Solaris 10 CD, I found that once the installer started, it mucked with the TTY to the point that when I managed to break it, I couldn't see any characters that I typed, etc. In general, the shell that I got wasn't usable at all. So I tried again, and this time managed to break into the startup sequence before the installer launched, which provided a rather functional shell.

It really seems like Sun should make this easier, however, by providing some sort of bootable recovery CD. This is one of the "rough edges" that Solaris still carries with it, that the Open Source UNIXes have mostly smoothed over. Fortunately, because Sun has given Solaris the Open Source treatment, Sun doesn't necessarily have to provide such a CD -- the community could step up and do it. Another of the advantages of Open Source.

Anyways, after getting my E220R booted off of the CD, I was able to hack the partition table on the boot disk, run newfs, and have a machine with a preserved root partition, but enlarged swap and more importantly, enlarged /var. Mission accomplished, but only after considerable effort.

-Andy.

By virtue of our IT person announcing that he is leaving EDS, my responsibilities are expanding. While I have prior experience with systems administration, and I have been dabbling in that space while at EDS, I think I'm actually going to have to get more serious about it now.

To get myself acquainted with a Dell PowerEdge 1750 server that we have, I decided to install FreeBSD on it. Seeing as how I haven't been on the "bleeding edge" of FreeBSD for quite awhile now (my home machine is still on FreeBSD 4.10+), I decided to give FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 4 a whirl.

I'm pleased to say that so far, it has been great. The install was a snap (well, mostly because they are still using sysinstall, which I have used many times in the past). All of the server hardware was automatically detected, including the Ethernet adapter, the built-in LSI SCSI Raid, and the dual Xeon processors. In fact, it appears as if SMP is finally enabled in the generic kernel, so I didn't have to re-compile in order to enable the second CPU (that's hot).

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll be able to roll FreeBSD into production -- nobody else on my team has ever touched FreeBSD, and I'm not getting the "eagerness to learn" vibe. So, my options are either Solaris/x86 or Linux, and I think I'm going to take the Solaris/x86 route. But, in the meantime, I'm going to try and play with the new FreeBSD as much as I can. When 6.0 ships, I'm going to have to take a serious look at making the jump on my home server.

-Andy.