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After updating my trusty old server to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 the installation of VMware Server 2.0.1 started giving problems. Resinstalling VMware didn’t help as I was repeatedly getting compilation problems in vmmon and vmnet modules. Luckily I stumbled across the following process from one of the VMware forum pages which pointed to a great work-around from the radu cotescu site.

So I take no credit for this but simply repeat it here so that the search gods may recognise it’s usefulness and +1 it’s importance.

Start by downloading VMware Server 2.0.2 from the official VMware site. If you haven’t already got a few licenses, get one now. (They’re free so you might as well get a few) I’m going to assume the downloaded file is in your home directory.

You also need to update the header files for your current kernel so that the configuration scripts from VMware can build the appropriate modules.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

Now just run the following commands.

cd /usr/local/src
sudo wget [http://codebin.cotescu.com/vmware/vmware-server-2.0.x-kernel-2.6.3x-install.sh]
sudo tar xvzf raducotescu-vmware-server-linux-2.6.3x-kernel-592e882.tar.gz
cd raducotescu-vmware-server-linux-2.6.3x-kernel-592e882/
sudo cp /home/<your_username>/VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gz .
sudo tar xvzf VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gz
sudo chmod +x vmware-server-2.0.x-kernel-2.6.3x-install.sh
./vmware-server-2.0.x-kernel-2.6.3x-install.sh

If you have a previous installation of VMware Server, you’ll be prompted that it’ll be removed as part of the install. Don’t worry, any guest VMs you had should still be there afterwards. The script will run through the usual prompts and you’ll see references to the patched files from Radu Cotescu. After a few minutes you should have a working install of VMware Server 2.0.2 on your Ubuntu 10.04 server.

If you’re struggling to get the LDAP extension to work in PHP and IIS6 then you may want to read on. In my situation both the web server and PHP were confirmed to be working fine and reading the correct php.ini. But even with the correct line enabled in the php.ini file, LDAP would refuse to show in phpinfo() output.

After some searching of my own, it turns out that IIS6 on Windows Server 2003 (possibly XP too) will not properly read the PATH variable. So if you add the path to your PHP directory to the end of PATH, the DLLs required are still not found. This looks to affect IIS6 specifically as filesystem calls to the same DLLs did find them.

The solution – add the path to your PHP install to the start or earlier in the PATH variable and restart IIS. In my experience you will now see the LDAP options appear in your phpinfo() output.

Some things work well on their own but when mixed make your life hard. Things like Linux and PHP work very well. Microsoft ISA proxy also does a good job in a corporate MS environment. But making the two work together in a controlled environment can be an exercise in frustration.

In this post I’ll pass on the methods I found to get PHP and your Linux boxes talking out through a corporate ISA proxy server. You can then bring in RSS feeds, updates and other things in WordPress and use apt-get to update Ubuntu. Read more »

For those people tearing their hair out trying to use the 7z util in a cron job, have a look in the Ubuntu forums for the solution. Strangely as soon as you start sending the output to a log file, the 7z part of your script will work.

I struck the problem in the Hardy version of Ubuntu Server.

If you’ve ever wondered why your plain text email message is randomly ignoring line breaks like \n or \r\n then you’re not alone. I regularly use PHPMailer to send off automated emails and usually in plain text to keep it simple.

What Outlook 2003 (and 2002 and 2007 versions apparently) likes to do is be super helpful and remove what it regards as extra line breaks. It won’t be consistent either within a single mail or across many but it will make the content difficult to read. What you thought would be new lines will now be joined up in places and it seems to happen more often the further through the content you go.

There don’t seem to be many fixes for this issue but there are a few work arounds to help out.

1. Turn off this “feature” in Outlook in the Tools»Options menu. Honestly I’m not sure what use it is anyway. Unfortunately you’d have to do this on all the recipient’s computers.
2. Use HTML in your email rather than plain text. Depending on your content and need for complete accuracy, perhaps more time than it’s worth.
3. Add twice the number of line breaks where you currently have them. This seems to help but now your email is rather full of white space and may be more difficult to read.

Other than changing email clients, which is pretty unlikely, that’s about it. If you know of other options to try and get Outlook to not remove line breaks, please leave a comment below. This Microsoft KB article explains which versions of Outlook are affected http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287816.

I’ve been looking around for some easy and open-source ways to handle database replication for a handful of small but important MySQL databases. A few options were viable but usually included too many config changes for things like creating a new database. DRDB on a Linux server seems to be one of the fastest and easiest methods to handle database synchronisation for DR purposes, so this is the subject of this post. The content is a combination of two main sources from Mark Schoonover and the Ubuntu server guide and the gotchas I found along the way.

This post will show you how to create two MySQL servers that automatically replicate all their databases using DRBD. With Heartbeat installed on a third machine you’ll have basic fail over protection as well (we’ll do this in another post). Only one of the database servers will be active at any one time. Read more »

I thought I’d make more use of WordPress on wekadesign.co.nz since it’s very powerful and apparently was recently voted top PHP based CMS ahead of Joomla and many other top-notch products. It’s ease-of-use and interface are all excellent and the massive user base and huge number of plugins make it very attractive for almost any web publishing.

After moving the small amount of static WekaDesign content into Pages, I copied a couple of files (index.php and .htaccess) from my WordPress folder (./blog) into the site root, changed the settings in WordPress (Settings»General»Blog Address) and viola, anyone going to www.wekadesign.co.nz, now hits WordPress. Good. Step one done.

Now to change the default landing page to be a static Page rather than the blog. Just as easy, visit Settings»Reading in WordPress and change the Front Page Displays option to be your Page. Excellent, now everyone lands at the the WordPress version of my static content. But how do you now send people to your old default blog page? You can use http://www.yoursite.co.nz/2009/ to target certain groups of content by date or category if you have Permalinks setup, but I couldn’t find the way that WP builds the default blog page.

It’s not obvious, but that 2nd option in Settings»Reading holds the key. The Posts Page option is asking you to select an existing WP Page that will act as a placeholder and be that default blog page. So, if you haven’t already, create a new Page with a suitable name. The name is important as that’s the URL everyone will use and see for your blog. So if you call the Page “peanut butter”, your blog page will now be http://www.yoursite.co.nz/peanut-butter/. It doesn’t matter what the content of the Page holds as no one will ever see it.

There is a slight “gotcha” with the Page names, in that any name being reused will work, but WP will append it with an incrementing number e.g. “peanut-butter-2″.

To finish off, just create a nice link on your site somewhere like the Sidebar to your default blog page.

After looking at some comments around Exchange Hosted Services, I thought I might do a quick (and very dirty) comparison between that and Google for 10,000 users. (This is no way reflects on the three options and may not resemble your reality).

MS Exchange Hosted Services would cost US$90k/month for company with 10k email users and selecting roughly half the options available (Communicator and Hosted Archive being two). That sounds really pricey vs local in-house servers and admins? I have no specific Exchange knowledge but say 20 servers across 5 virtual hosts, plus storage and backups is roughly NZ$350-400k as a one-off cost. Plus a team of seven admins to run it @ NZ$80k pa each is a five year cost of around $2.8 million, but lets say $3.2M to round it up to include a few software licenses and some power,cooling and floor space.

Google’s offering that I compared MS against is their Premier Edition of Apps. It’s US$50 per user per year and offers the usual email, calendar, resource booking, etc much like Exchange. I was expecting a few missing features but was surprised to see BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) synching and user and group provisioning APIs. It integrates with LDAP and offers Single Sign-On (SSO) so most of your users won’t see too much of a change – especially if they keep on using the Outlook client. The main issue for some businesses may be the 99.9% uptime guarantee – that’s 8h 45m down time per year. I’m sure there are a few features that Exchange holds over Apps but in many situations the cost may outweigh the benefit or it’s just not needed. Using Google Apps also unties you from MS Outlook and possibly MS Office, so this option may open the door to other savings.

So over 5 years for the 10k user company we have the following options:

In-house MS Exchange with 20 VMs, storage and 7 admins = NZ$3.2M

MS Exchange Hosted Services with a mid-tier option seclection @ US$90k/month = NZ$7.4M (at today’s exch rate of 0.72)

Google Apps Premier Edition @ US$50 per user per year = NZ$3.5M

Now one stands out there and not for a particularly good reason. The MS EHS option does include Communicator and Hosted Archiving as an option but I don’t see the extra value over staying with what you have or sending it all to Google. Add to both the off-site options, the project costs of actually implementing this and your own Exchange would have to be in a bad way or have some serious pain to go either way.

What are your thoughts on this one? Are my locally run Exchange costs way off for 10k users and are there any NZ based companies of a similar size (NZ Post’s 2100 users are on the way to Google Apps) that have taken either remote option? Is Google half the service or twice the value of the MS offering?

My last thought would be – just how reliable is that internet connection of yours?

I have 10 Google Wave invites to give away. If anybody would like one, please leave a comment below or DM @mikemcmurray on Twitter. First in first served.

I’m happy to announce that a new version of Weka Design’s free wiki software called Kisimi is available. There are a huge number of improvements in the 20091025 release. Here are some of the more important ones.

• Page security allows you to dictate exactly who can view and edit your pages. Some people can edit your pages, some can view and everyone else can’t see a thing. Security is as finely grained as you want it to be.
• Kisimi now comes with an upgrade option at installation time and things are a little smarter. Installation can take less than 2 minutes!
• Longer pages with headings can automatically generate a table of contents section.
• Users can specify a timezone so that the dates and times are relevant to their location.
• Administrators can prevent new user sign ups. Handy for those sites publishing their documentation and support pages to the world.
• Any user with an email address listed at www.gravatar.com has their avatar image appear in their preferences.
• Tidier user interface with plenty of little shiny bits.
• Plenty of bug fixes including those messages for PHP configs that show all warnings. It’s still recommnended that PHP is configured without warnings for production servers.

Just head to http://kisimi.wekadesign.co.nz to download the latest version and start managing your online wiki content better.