Economy of Effort

August, 2010

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Linux USB Bootable Stick Netinstall That Works

August 12th, 2010

Today, I spent a lot of time fussing with bootable USB thumbsticks, trying to set one up that would boot the new backup server I just built at work. The machine has no optical drive, so I just wanted to boot a simple netinstall and have the system pull everything it needs from remote mirrors.

The supposed easy method was to use Unetbootin. Everything about it was easy, except for the part where the bootable USB sticks it created didn’t work. Every boot attempt was met with “Boot error” or “Missing operating system”.

Since I am on Ubuntu, I tried to use Ubuntu’s usb-creator. Also a nice app, except for the fact that it too failed to work. In usb-creator’s case, the failure was to even get started. I would browse to the ISO that I wanted to use as the image for my boot stick, and the app refused to load it, or any ISO. No error, the app simply didn’t respond to the input.

So, two piece-a-junk GUI apps down. After a little digging, I found the methods that created working USB sticks on the first try.

For CentOS:

1. Download diskboot.img from a CentOS mirror’s centos/(version)/os/(arch)/images folder.
(I used the kernel.org mirror and i386 arch, so my diskboot.img was located at: http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5.5/os/i386/images/)

2. Insert USB stick (I’ll assume it’s /dev/sdb, adjust instructions to fit your system), format to FAT32 (I used Gparted for this)

3. Run:

dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sdb

4. Remove USB drive, stick into machine that’s getting the CentOS install, and boot
When asked for installation media, select HTTP. Use the website and folder path of the mirror you’re using.
So, from my example:
Website name: mirrors.kernel.org
CentOS directory: centos/5.5/os/i386

Proceed through installer as normal.

For Debian:

1. Download boot.img.gz from /debian/dists/(version)/main/(installer-arch)/current/images/hd-media folder
(I did i386 stable from Debian’s US mirror, so boot.img.gz was located at: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/)

2. Download Debian netinstall ISO (I used: http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.5/i386/iso-cd/debian-505-i386-netinst.iso)

2. Insert USB drive (again I’ll assume /dev/sdb) and format to FAT32

3. Run:

zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdb

4. Remove and re-insert USB drive. Copy the netinstall ISO to the USB drive.

5. Stick USB into machine getting the Debian install, boot, and run through installer.

I imagine these instructions will probably stay good for a long time. You’ll just need to adjust for mirror location, arch and release numbers, but the URLs I’ve provided here should give you a good clue as to where to find the necessary files on the mirror you’re using.

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Why Brightkite is Pissing Me Off

August 8th, 2010

brightkite Why Brightkite is Pissing Me Off

Brightkite is one of those location-based social net services, the ones where you “check in” at places and see where other people check in. It’s like Gowalla and Foursquare, except (IMO) not quite as good.

The one compelling feature of Brightkite, however, is group SMS. It allows users to create an SMS “party line”, which works with any SMS-capable phone. Chatters don’t even have to be part of the service – they can simply be invited by phone number.

This, however, creates weird Brightkite “garbage” accounts (my term), which creates issues when that phone number goes and becomes a full-blown Brightkite member. In my family’s little group text, for example, there’s one of these garbage accounts which corresponds to a phone number that is now a number associated with a real Brightkite account. But other than polluting our chat’s user list, this is mostly harmless.

Less harmless is the fact that the friends list appears completely broken. My wife and I, for example, just sat next to each other, on our respective MacBooks, typing in each other’s username and real names, trying to pull up each other’s profile so that we can friend each other.

Every search, zero hits.

We were finally able to figure out that we could see each other’s profile by clicking on each other’s name in the group chat userlist. However, when we attempted to friend each other, the service said that we’re already friends.

Yet, when we look at our own friends list, neither of us appear on the other’s friend list.

This is just the latest way in which Brightkite has shown itself to me to be a bit of a wreck. Unfortunately, I have found no other service that gives us the ability to do this sort of group SMS that works with any SMS user (we’ve found things that work with all iPhones, for example, but my parents aren’t on iPhones yet. If anyone knows of other services that do this, please let me know).

Brightkite: For God’s Sake, Sort Yourself Out.

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Back Online

August 2nd, 2010

Migrated this site from Dreamhost to my VPS at prgmr.com. After running our own servers at work for the past year, I couldn’t put up with a shared host anymore. I put myself on prgmr’s waiting list and picked up a 512MB slice when they finally started selling some again (they’re out of everything again).

Eventually I’m going to get Nginx + PHP5-FPM to run this WordPress install, but for now, it’s Apache2 + mod_php. Definitely looking at using Nginx + Passenger for Rails deployments at work, need to get some practice setting that up too.