i recently had a hard drive fail in my server. luckily i was running it in a raid 1 array so all of my data was kept safe. i decided that while i had a hard drive out of service that i might as well take some time to do some upgrading of my storage space. i had been just running two basic raid 1 arrays (each with two 1 TB drives) using mdadm with ext3 for my virtual machines and other assorted storage....
as i mentioned in my previous blog article, adobe temporarily pulled 64 bit support for the 64 bit plugin. a few days ago (september 15) they released preview 1 of flash player 10.2. if you have followed the instructions in my previous article, upgrading is quite simple. if not, don’t worry, there are only a few extra steps! please remember that this is a beta version so it may not be 100% stable....
somewhat recently, adobe has pulled all support for 64 bit flash player on linux. debian has also remove the support from it’s non-free archives so the flashplugin-nonfree package no longer works properly. i find that gnash and swfdec are pretty lacking and are not compatible with all websites which is a major problem for me. after searching online, i found a 64 bit copy of libflashplayer.so and wanted to install it the debian way using update-alternatives....
update 10/21/2011 - it appears that this bug has come up again with a number of people who have updated to iOS 5. luckily, the solution is the same as before. i have updated the instructions to help with any changes that iOS 5 added. before you start - this will only work if your photos actually exist on your device but do not show up in in the camera roll....
continued from part 1 yesterday i received my soekris engineering net4801-60 in the mail. the unit seems to be in good condition and even came with a compactflash card and vpn1411 card which i won’t end up using. i will most likely end up selling the vpn card as i don’t use my smoothwall to create a vpn and the smoothwall os does not have support built into the kernel for a vpn card such as this anyway....
even though all of my parts have not arrived for my new smoothwall project, i can begin to do some initial setup. first of all, here are all of the items of which i needed to find for the project: soekris engineering net4801-60 soekris engineering 2.5" hdd mounting kit soekris engineering power supply 2.5" ide hard drive 10 foot serial null modem cable since i already have the hard drive, i can do some of the prep work by installing smoothwall....
like many people, i like to tinker with all sorts of different technology including multiple operating systems as well as the different roles they can play. one of the best ways that i can do that is by using a virtualization product. i just happen to use vmware server 2.0 on my debian lenny server. vmware is one of the leaders in virtualization (if not the leader). at home, i have five virtual machines that i rely on heavily for my day-to-day operations....
i’ve decided to look more into power efficiency of my computers at home. while my power bill isn’t horrible, it could most definitely be lower. there are only a few computers that i leave running 24/7. one of them is my smoothwall. while i built that computer with power efficiency in mind, i didn’t take things to the extreme that i could have. now i want to build a solution that is closer in power consumption to your typical home router appliance....