Here are some tips for getting Sun Microsystem’s Java environment up and running smoothly on Ubuntu. This includes the JRE (Java Runtime Environment – for running Java apps) and the JDK (Java Development Kit – for creating Java apps). It’s actually easier than you think! Basically, add the universe repo and use synaptec. An added advantage is that you can install updates through there too.
Author Archives: Laz
Up2date versus yum
Well, this might be old news for some but maybe not for others so I thought I would share. I have been using RedHat (and its derivitives) for ten years or more now, so I have been real comfortable with up2date. In recent times, I knew yum was out there and you could use one or the other, but I stuck with up2date because after all, if it aint broke, don’t fix it, right? Well, then up2date broke. I noticed I was getting errors when trying to check for new updates and after a little research I found that the up2date repositories (for CentOS anyway) are gone, they removed them. This means that up2date is pretty much useless. I read up on yum a little bit and installed all of updates (by now there were quite a few that I needed) without a hitch, both in test and production. So, what I am passing on is that up2date has gone by the wayside, you might can get it to work again with a lot of tinkering, but my advice is to go ahead and make the switch to yum. You’ll be all the better and happier for it. From what I read, it does a better job of finding updates and dependancies as well. I certainly had no trouble with it (so far). You can run yum check-update to see if you have anything that needs to be updated, and yum update to get them. These are synonamous with up2date -l and up2date -u. Enjoy!
Splunk is awesome, get it NOW!
I found a cool tool, and that doesn’t even do it justice, I found a freakin’ awesome tool for monitoring whats going on with your servers and server logs. It’s called Splunk, and it’s been around a while (a couple years at least, maybe more), but I just recently got the chance to check it out.
Wow. Now, remember, I don’t do ANY paid reviews on this site. So this is not me promoting something because I got a check for it. This is me promoting something because of the principles of what I started this site for. I found something totally cool, useful, well worth the time and money to invest in it and I want to tell all my readers about it. That being said, just in case someone from Splunk is reading this right now and would like to send me a check, or a free license for the good promotion, I am all for it just drop me a line! 🙂
Anyway, this software can run on Windows, Linux, UNIX, you name it. It accepts syslog input, flat file log parsing, interfaces with WMI and more. So far, it knows what to do with everything I throw at it. All that log data is chopped up and stored in a database so you can easily get meaningful information back out. Probably the best feature of this whole darn thing is the interface. Splunk has a CLI which rocks, but the web interface is one of the best I have ever seen. Very slick, very nice, very easy to navigate, very easy to sort and search, truly amazing. I have used other systems similar in theory (I won’t name names), and they didn’t do a half bad job at collecting the data, but it was getting anything useful out of it later that was the tough part. Plus their appliance was much, much more expensive.
Now, do you want to know the best part? Wait for it …. yep, it’s free! No, really, it’s true. They have a freely available and usable version of the software that 100% works. The catch is that some advanced features are not enabled, and you are limited to 500MB of log data per day. That’s great for most small shops, and to buy the Enterprise license for more features and data logging capacity, the pricing is not near as bad as the others I have seen. Top that off with this being a better product and it’s like win, win … win … win … or something.
Go check it out, you’ll thank me if you haven’t done so already. It’s free and installs in seconds, it’s so easy to setup you’ll laugh when you are done. Go … now … go! Enjoy!
PERL Tip For Data In Arrays
Recently I was working on a script for log reporting. You know, one of those handy little guys that send you some info every day helping to make sure you keep up with whatever it is that you don’t want to forget about. Well, some of the data was in a plain old text file, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s easy to simply cat the file and pipe it through mailx or mutt, no fuss, no muss.
LightScribe On Linux and AMD64
Here we go with more work on my Alienware box where I ripped out Windows Vista and installed Ubuntu (8.04 Hardy Heron). I haven’t looked back since … ok, I do miss some games that don’t like Cedega or Crossover, but it’s a small price to pay for all of the other benefits I get from running Linux, and especially Ubuntu which is based on Debian.
One of the things that I got with this box was a LightScribe compaible DVD-R/CD-R. This is great, except I didn’t have any clue how to get it to work in Linux. After some digging on the net and reading all around, I got it working and boiled the steps down to a concice recipe.
These steps are listed below. Please note that these *should* work for 32 or 64 bit distros, but specifically I am running AMD64, so part of this was to get over that hump. Details are below with the commands.
Installing a LAMP Stack on Ubuntu
I am using Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) as my primary desktop OS, and I wanted to install some tools for doing development work. At the same time, I thought I might run through the steps and post them for anyone else that might be looking to do the same thing. I’ll walk you through what I am doing, it’s your typical Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) stack.
First off, you can use sudo to run these install commands as your own local user, by putting sudo before each command, but I find it easier and more concise to simply use sudo to become root and install that way. I will write this article from that perspective, so if you don’t want to do this as root, simply put sudo before each command here.
You can become root by using this command from a terminal session:
sudo su -
Now that we are root, let us install MySQL which will be our database server:
apt-get install mysql-server
Next, let’s install Apache for our web server:
apt-get install apache2
In my case, I am developing in PHP, so we need to install PHP for Apache:
apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
Last but not least, if you want a nice database manager, get phpMyAdmin:
apt-get install phpmyadmin
If this is not a box that you have KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) access to, and you will be connecting remotely, you will need to install the OpenSSH server so you can ssh into the server. Do this like so:
apt-get install openssh-server
Once installed, you should be able to log into the server with your user account. Please note that by default, you cannot log in as root via ssh. There you have it, now start writing some cool code!