This tutorial tries to show you how to setup a wonderful quiet fanless system.
I’ve bought a LEX NEO, a terribly nice Mini-ITX fanless barebone which includes an onboard bootable CF-card slot.
Thomas Bocek (nope.ch) helped me out with the following configuration.
The idea was:

• The harddisk should only run when used
• The whole system should be stored on a CF-card
• We don’t want to stress our CF-card. Directories with a lot of access like /var/log should be run in RAM

We decided to install Debian Linux by USB-install, using a USB-stick instead of running some PXE network install which seems to be far more complicated.
Here’s a short HOWTO (for more detailed instructions, please check Debian USB memory stick booting:
Download boot.img.gz (7.9 MB). Also, download the official netinst image (108 MB). If you can’t find it, check http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ and download the stable i386 version.

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Rsync is a command line utility traditionally used in synchronizing files between two computers over the network, but rsync can also be used as an effective backup tool.
This article explains how to use rsync to backup your whole Linux system setup to a second drive attached to your system. You can use a removable drive, such as an external USB hard drive, so that you can store the backups in a safe place away from your working environment.

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I’d just like to publish this small kernel compilation HOWTO’s that I once wrote and used by myself each time compiling a new kernel.
They are just quick and dirty HOWTO’s that cover the commands used to compile a kernel, nothing more than that. But I’m sure someone might find them useful.
Kernel compiling is easy! Don’t be afraid of it. Just be careful when configuring your bootloader, e.g. LILO – first think and then act, especially if you’re compiling a new kernel on a remote host where you haven’t got any physical access.

• kernel-compile_debian.txt
  This HOWTO covers kernel compilation in “the Debian way”
• kernel-compile_vanilla.txt
  a pure vanilla stock kernel compilation HOWTO

If you wish further information about kernel compilation under Debian, consult this wonderful tutorial:
http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html
again, to make it short, really really short, here’s what to do under Debian:

$> cd /usr/src
$> dpkg -i kernel-source-2.4.xx_2.4.xx_all.deb
$> tar -jxf kernel-source-2.4.xx.tar.bz2
$> ln -s kernel-source-2.4.xx linux
$> cd linux
 
$> make menuconfig
$> make-kpkg clean kernel_image
 
$> cd ..
$> dpkg -i kernel-image-2.4.xx_10.00.Custom_i386.deb
 
$> lilo

Good luck and happy compiling!

Finally I did some testing on those scripts and now they should work. You should be able to import all data from any Phorum 3.4.x version but I strongly recommend to first update to 3.4.6.
Both scripts have been tested on an import from Phorum 3.4.6 to phpBB 2.0.6c.
The main update script (phorum2phpbb.php.txt) has been taken from the i18n/Converters forum of phpBB and slightly modified while the user import script (phorum2phpbb_users.php.txt) has been written by myself.
Check my post on phpBB:
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=860473&highlight=#860473
HOWTO:

1. backup all data from Phorum
2. install phpBB
3. set the Phorum database information in phorum2phpbb.php (dbname, dbuser, dbhost, dbpasswd)
4. make sure the default table for Phorum is set correctly ($phpbb_forums_table)
5. run phorum2phpbb.php inside your phpBB root-directory
6. (optional) if you wish to import all registered users from Phorum, edit phorum2phpbb_users.php, set the database information and run it.

1. backup all data from Phorum
2. install phpBB
3. set the Phorum database information in phorum2phpbb.php (dbname, dbuser, dbhost, dbpasswd)
4. make sure the default table for Phorum is set correctly ($phpbb_forums_table)
5. run phorum2phpbb.php inside your phpBB root-directory
6. (optional) if you wish to import all registered users from Phorum, edit phorum2phpbb_users.php, set the database information and run it.

…Yet Another Browser Detector
First I thought about calling this script ‘ExtrAgent’, then I thought, hey,
there’s a whole bunch of other browser detection scripts around, so actually
it’s just yet another browser detector!
I have just updated this code and replaced the old function with the new class Sd_Yabd. It takes part of my upcoming PHP framework “Sourdough” which will be released in april/may 2004.

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To get the filesize of a file that isn’t located on your own server is not such
an easy thing! There’s this nice function in PHP to get the size of your files,
filesize() – but it just works for local files.

This workaround should work. – kinda slow, as you need to make a connection to the
remote host, but that’s probably the only way to do it:

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Currently I’m working on SourDough Framework, my light opensource framework for web-applications written in PHP. It contains a database abstraction layer I started to work on together with Rocco Siegrist back in summer 2002. This part is already pretty mature. My upcoming applications PPhlogger3 (future version of PowerPhlogger), Pigalle (picture gallery) and Yabook (guestbook) are going to work on the following database systems: MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server 2k. I have already tested them on those systems. The DB abstraction layer should also support FrontBase, Interbase, and Sybase – but this hasn’t been tested yet.

Today I ran over SQLite. I didn’t really expect a lot of this “Embeddable SQL Database Engine”, how they call it. It stores data into flat files and pretends to almost fully support SQL92.
I was interested about it and implemented another layer for SQLite in my framework. And, wow, it works! It didn’t take me more than 2 hours. Currently, YaBook already runs with SQLite as DBS. I didn’t encounter any serious problems. Well, it took me some time to realize that SQLite is typeless. Pretty funny, though.
Instead of AUTOINCREMENTs I had to use INTEGER PRIMARY KEY. Even indexes seem to work.
I haven’t done any performance testing yet, but for simple operations it should be fine. For an application like YaBook it might as well be faster than MySQL.

SQLite has been bundled with PHP5. Effectively this means that anybody, even users at share hosters with no access to their server, will be able to use SQL databases. Great!

I’ve added a GeoURL meta tag and added it to their database. You can click the little green image below the right hand side menu to see who else is geographically located near me.
That’s my geographical location:
Lat: 47° 23′ 42″ , Long: 8° 32′ 6″ (47.3951 , 8.5352)

What a great idea, GeoURL! no?

Microsoft .NET vs. J2EE – Welche Technologie wird siegen? Was für Vorteile bringt uns .NET? Was steckt überhaupt hinter diesem Begriff?
Im Rahmen meines Studienprojektes bei der Credit Suisse Leasing habe ich dieses Interview mit Benjamin Voigt geführt.

Benjamin Voigt ist seit 2001 aktiver Microsoft Student Consultant an der Universität Zürich. Als ehemaliger Linux-Crack und Anhänger der OpenSource-Gemeinde besitzt er ein äusserst breit gefächertes Wissen. Gewiss kann er nicht als engstirniger Microsoftianer bezeichnet werden.
Momentan beschäftigt er sich mit XML, SOAP und zahlreichen neuen Entwicklungen innerhalb Microsoft’s .NET Framework. Er bereitet sich auf einen .NET Workshop im Oktober 2003 vor, für den er auch sehr viel seiner Freizeit aufwendet. Das Meiste macht Benjamin aus Eigeninitiative und Freude an der Technologie selbst und hat weniger mit seiner Anstellung bei Microsoft selbst zu tun. Dies zeichnet ihn zu einem äusserst interessanten Gesprächspartner aus, und ich bin ihm äusserst dankbar, dass er sich Zeit für dieses Interview genommen hat.

read interview

This script recursively scans through your directories and changes file extensions.

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you want to list a whole directory’s contents…
use the following function to list all files of the directory $url including filesize:

function directoryList ($url) {
	$outp = "";
	$d = dir($url);
	while($entry = $d->read()) {
		$size = round(filesize($url.$entry)/1024);
		if ($size > 999) $sizestring = ((round($size/100))/10)." mb";
		else $sizestring = $size." kb";
		$outp .= "<a href="https://www.iezzi.ch/wp-admin/%22.$url.$entry.%22">".$entry."</a> [ ".$sizestring." ]
		\n";
	}
	$outp = "Path: ".$d-&gt;path."
	\n".$outp;
	$d-&gt;close();
	return $outp;
}