Jul 07
Just traded in my 2000 BMW Z3 and 2001 Toyota Corolla for this 2004 BMW 330Ci:
My Server's Continuous Uptime: 143 days, 19 hours, 9 minutes
Jun 14
The newest version of WebTester, my online testing and quizzing software, has been released, along with a completely new site re-design. You can check out the site here:
Feel free to check out the newly created forums:
Or, you can log into the demo, using the following information:
Username: admin
Password: admin
WebTester Admin
WebTester Engine
Take a look and tell me what you think.
Apr 25
Just saw this on my TiVo’s main menu, with a link to the web site:
“You get first dibs on the new TiVo® Series2™ DT DVR with 12 months of service included for only $254.”
Apr 17
Saw this on the sidewalk next to our local Wal-Mart:
Apr 17
Sometimes, Adobe InDesign will crash when trying to print on a user account with a networked home folder under Mac OS X. Here is the fix that I use:
ditto -rsrc /System/Library/Printers /Library/Printers
I send that command to all computers with the problem via ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) and it seems to resolve all of the issues.
If that doesn’t work, you need to copy or create a Printers folder in the current users Library folder. Drop into Terminal and type the following:
mkdir ~/Library/Printers
Those two methods have resolved most of our InDesign printing issues.
Apr 12
I recently had an issue where my server was not recording the last login time and IP address when you logged in via SSH. I believe I ran into this bug.
To fix, I added a single line to my /etc/ssh/sshd_config file:
UseLogin yes
Now the server properly records the last login date, time, and IP address, and the lastlog command is now working properly.
Apr 12
One of my friends, Jeremy Bergen, is running a TeamSpeak server on one of my servers, and was running into a resource temporarily unavailable while ssh’d into the box. The TeamSpeak server was also randomly shutting down, and this may have been caused by the same error. TeamSpeak uses around between 10-16 processes itself, so after a logging in a few times or doing other things, this default limit of 20 it reached.
To fix this, first I turned off cPanel’s built in ‘Prevent Shell Fork Bomb Protection’. Then, I edited the /etc/security/limits.conf. I still wanted users to be limited to 20 processes, except for the TeamSpeak user which I wanted to have 40, and root which I wanted unlimited. Here are the lines that I had:
* soft nproc 20 jeremy soft nproc 40 root soft nproc unlimited
Of course, you can customize the file however you like. The key is turning off cPanel’s internal protection so your box will use this file. Also, I happen to use CentOS 4.3.
Apr 04
Here at the school district I was running into a problem where if several Mac OS X wireless clients logged into the network at once, everything slowed down to a crawl. After researching the problem, it looked like the user’s Library and Microsoft User Data folders were causing the problem. I tried turning on OS X’s home folder syncronization, but that didn’t work very well, and filled up our older computers fast. The solution I found was to locally cache the user’s Library and Microsoft User Data folder. To do this, create a symbolic link from the user’s networked ‘Library’ folder and point it to a local source. I chose /tmp/UserCache/username/Library. Here is the login script I created to automate the process:
#! /bin/bash
# Create local user caches of important directories
# Written by Steven Eppler 04/04/2006
export PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
# Set user variable
user="$1"
# This grabs the user's home directory server
input=`dscl localhost read Search/Users/$user NFSHomeDirectory`
nethomedir=${input:18}
# Or you can hardcode it...
# nethomedir="/Network/Servers/ServerName/Volume/$user"
# Check for blank nethomedir - otherwise you will delete
# the root /Library folder!
if [ """$nethomedir""" != "" ]; then
echo $user
echo $nethomedir
# Create local caching directories
mkdir /tmp/UserCache
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user/Microsoft\ User\ Data
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user/Library
# Give everyone rights to them...
chmod -R ugo=rwx /tmp/UserCache
# Create Documents and Desktop folder (sometimes they don't exist)
mkdir $nethomedir/Documents
mkdir $nethomedir/Desktop
# Delete old folders or links
rm -rf $nethomedir/Library
rm -rf $nethomedir/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data
# Create new links
ln -s /tmp/UserCache/$user/Library $nethomedir/Library
ln -s /tmp/UserCache/$user/Microsoft\ User\ Data $nethomedir/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data
fi
Mar 28
As posted previously, I have been working on porting my WebTester program from ASP to PHP. New features include:
- Ability to randomize questions
- Integrated HTML Editor (no more manual coding)
- ‘Enter’ key selects Next instead of Previous
- Ported from ASP to PHP (so it can be hosted on a Mac/Linux/Windows box, instead of limited to Windows/IIS)
- Generates math equations on the fly, by converting LaTeX math code into a graphic, such as:
- General UI enhancements
To give it a spin, try out the test server. Here are the addresses:
Take a test: http://webtester.epplersoft.com
Administration: http://webtester.epplersoft.com/admin
The username/password combination to use is: demo/demo
This is not the final, so bugs may exist that have already been fixed. To generate math while creating a test, use the following format:
[tex]a^2 + b^2 = c^2[/tex]
The above will generate this image:
To create your own equations, you can try out a program called MathType by Design Science. I will also list other LaTeX generating programs as I find them.
If you have any questions, just leave a comment.
Mar 10
I just upgraded my server to the new 2.0.2 release of Wordpress after seeing this story on digg.com:
A new version of the popular open source project WordPress fixes several security issues.