Blog Entry

My trusty computer companion of the last five years, Marian, has been replaced by a new hottie, Hillary. Marian, an aging celeron 400Mhz/256M/40G running RedHat 7.3, serviced me well, doing sendmail/fetchmail/web/mysql/perl developement chores. But times change and so must I. Hillary is a Athlon XP 2600 Barton 1.9Ghz/512M/80G RedHat 9.0 system that now runs everything like Marian used to -- BUT FASTER. So, hail Hillary.

A few notes:

• My initial experiences with RedHat 9.0 bolster my long standing suspicion that RedHat hates Perl. Out of the box, perl 5.8.0 had trouble writing makefiles. This is related to a unicode issue that may be solved by setting one's environment variable to LANG=en_US. Rasberries to RedHat.
• New Egg is a good place to buy computer parts CHEAP. I assembled Hillary from parts costing $343, including shipping & handling. The 400W power supply came with the LED-enhanced mid-tower case for $29. I bought the Biostart motherboard (LAN/Video/Audio on board) for $56. The CPU was $90. The 512MB DRR PC-2100 RAM was $72. The 80G Maxtor/ATA133 was $66. Good stuff. Unforuntately, debian's current stable release, Woody, is too freakin' old to recognized the onboard LAN. This makes it hard to use apt-get. Perhaps the fine folks running debian might consider shipping a 2.4 kernel before the 2.6 comes out. Woody ships with a 2.2 kernel from 2002.
• I've taken to keeping a lot of system-y things in my home directory, like my DNS files and mon. This turns out to be really useful when you need to rsync your home directory. I also have a crazy perl script that starts personal services, like ssh tunnels, VNC, apache and mon. As a kind of a kludge, a cron job attempts to rerun the script every 2 minutes to make sure that these services are running, even if the machine is rebooted. I've included the script below, in case someone is interested. It's essentially a steroid-enhanced version of a shell script.

File: setup_jjohn #!/usr/bin/env perl # -*-cperl-*- # # start|stop processes that I need # use strict; use warnings; use File::Basename; use Getopt::Std; our $HOME = "/home/jjohn"; our $LASTRUN = "$HOME/etc/.jjohn_setup"; our %PROCS = ( '01 SSH tunnels' => { start => "$HOME/etc/ssh_mail_tunnel start", stop => "$HOME/etc/ssh_mail_tunnel stop", }, '02 MON' => { start => "$HOME/etc/mon/start_mon", stop => "killall mon", }, '99 VNC' => { start => "$HOME/bin/start_vnc", stop => "/usr/bin/vncserver -kill :1", }, '04 Fetchmail' => { start => "/usr/bin/fetchmail", stop => "killall fetchmail", }, '03 Apache'=> { start => "/usr/bin/sudo $HOME/src/apache-current/bin/apachectl start", stop => "/usr/bin/sudo $HOME/src/apache-current/bin/apachectl stop", }, ); my $opts = {}; getopts('h?fv', $opts); $|++; my $action = (lc pop @ARGV) || 'start'; my %dispatch = ( 'stop' => \&stop, 'start' => \&start, 'usage' => \&usage, 'status' => \&status, ); $action = 'usage' if $opts->{'?'} || $opts->{'h'}; if (exists $dispatch{$action}) { $dispatch{$action}->($opts); } else { start($opts); } exit; #--------------------------------------------------------------------- sub start { my ($opts) = @_; # Skip the LASTRUN check if the force flag is set unless ($opts->{f}) { # compare the boot time (/var/lock/subsys/local) to our last runtime if (-e $LASTRUN) { my $sysboot = (stat "/var/lock/subsys/local")[9]; my $lastrun = (stat $LASTRUN)[9]; # if we have run after system boot, bail if ($lastrun > $sysboot) { warn "Already ran since boot. Halting.\n" if $opts->{v}; return; } } } for my $proc (sort keys %PROCS) { printf "Starting %-25s:", $proc if $opts->{v}; my $ok = "OK"; if (system("$PROCS{$proc}->{start} 2>&1 > /dev/null")) { $ok = "FAILED"; } printf "%15s\n", $ok if $opts->{v}; } # print out PID to LASTRUN open my $pid, ">$LASTRUN" or die "can't open '$LASTRUN': $!\n"; select(((select $pid) => $|++)[0]); print $pid $$; close $pid; } # stop the services above sub stop { my ($opts) = @_; for my $proc (reverse sort keys %PROCS) { printf "Stopping %-25s:", $proc if $opts->{v}; my $ok = "OK"; if (system("$PROCS{$proc}->{stop} 2>&1 > /dev/null")) { $ok = "FAILED"; } printf "%15s\n",$ok if $opts->{v}; } unlink $LASTRUN; } sub usage { my $name = basename $0; print "$name - control services for jjohn USAGE: $name [OPTIONS] [ACTION] \$ $name -v start # start services with verbosity \$ $name stop # stop services silently \$ $name status # show boot time vs. last run of this program OPTIONS: h print this screen ? print this screen f force start, regardless of LASTRUN file v turn on verbose messages "; } sub status { my ($opts) = @_; my $lastrun = (stat $LASTRUN)[9]; my $boot = (stat "/var/lock/subsys/local")[9]; my $name = basename $0; my $ltime = (defined $lastrun) ? scalar localtime($lastrun) : "NEVER RUN"; my $btime = scalar localtime($boot); printf "%16s: %-20s\n%16s: %-20s\n", "system boot", $btime, "$name ran", $ltime; }

[Original use.perl.org post and comments.]