GeekLimit

Operating System Installation

Ok, I have my machine ready to go.. er, well, as ready as it will ever be. This machine was previously known as a Win98/2000 lab machine, rocking out a 400mhz P3, 256MB of ramdom memory modules I stuffed in there, an aenemic 4.3GB hard drive, a 10/100 NIC (with BNC connector!) a 54x CD drive (seems like the best part of the machine) and a 4MB video card (woo!).

It should be enough to handle web server duties, but since this machine is free and represents what most people probably have laying around (at least). I’ll stick with it, even though I suspect it most likely is a little underpowered.

CD ISO burned to disk, disk in drive, machine on.

BIOS

Had to change the machine to boot from CD before C. Not that I didn’t have a touch of nostalgia seeing the Windows 2000 splash screen…or was that nausea?

Install

I chose to install the base installaton, since this isn’t a workstation.
Language > English, US. Keyboard: US

While it’s installing, time to go look into what needs to be done to turn this Linux server into a LAMP! Google to the rescue – found this forum posting by ‘machiner’ over at ubuntuforums.org entitled ‘This may help newbies – Quick LAMP howto – Ubuntu’. It sounds like a pain, and is written for a previous version of Ubuntu. I’ll read this while the machine finishes installing, and use it if the default installers in Ubuntu don’t work.

hostname > intranet

erase hda1 (format hard drive and use default partitions) > yes > yes

[waiting]

D’oh! – drive failure! trying another 4.3GB drive with default Ubuntu install……OK

OK, so while that finishes loading (on a good hard drive), I’ll go looking for the Joomla Components and Modules that I want to use, in addition to the defaults that come with Joomla. It’s not hard to find these via google or the Joomla Developer SourceForge, and most of them are released under the GPL.

Summary

Time spent in article: 60 (ouch!)
Time spent on project: 505
Goals accomplished:

• Installed Operating system – Ubuntu Linux 5.10 ‘Breezy Badger’

The Content Management System / Website core

OK, so while the Ubuntu CD is still downloading (using my open-source Firefox browser, of course), I need to find an open-source Content Management System (CMS) that has a frontend, an administrative backend, and enough community support and add-on modules that I’ll be able to do everything I want to do. There are a lot of these out there, and a lot of great sites to demo a lot of these CMSs.

I’m going to choose Joomla, since I’ve used Mambo before, and I know there’s literally thousands of modules that plug in to Mambo/Joomla. What’s up with the name? Joomla used to be called Mambo, and there was some debate or something that Mambo wasn’t always going to be 100% open-source, so all the developers left and made their own CMS called Joomla. Joomla 1.0 was basically exactly the same as Mambo 4.5.2, but with a few extras that had been in development before the split.

What the… not a good sign here… the Joomla website is having some problems. Seems like a bad omen. We’ll find out, no turning back now… I managed to find a copy of Joomla 1.0.7 on Softpedia’s website, downloading the 2.4MB file now…

ISO Imaging

I just realized that I have no way of getting my Ubuntu Install CD onto an actual CD. Right now I am 17% away from having it downloaded! Luckily, I’ve used a program before for Windows XP called ISO Recorder, and it’s free. Whew! A quick download, and I’m ready to burn that CD…when it gets done downloading.

Summary

Time spent in this article: 15 minutes
Time remaining for project: 565 minutes
Goals accomplished:

• Content Management System found
• ISO imaging program found (unplanned)

Internal IP’s and External Subdomains

OK, so before I do anything, I need a machine to build on. It needs to be in the DMZ, so both external and internal computers can find it. That means assigning it a static IP address, which I can look into while the OS is loading.

I make the computer name ‘intranet’, and people who are in my xyzdomain.org network will be able to hit the server in their web browser at intranet.xyzdomain.org.

For people outside my organization, I need to register a domain name so that when someone surfs to extranet.xyzdomain.org, it will hit port 80 on my org’s firewall, and get forwarded to the web server internally. Luckily, we already have a domain name, so registering the ‘extranet’ subdomain to point to the firewall (along with the default ‘www’ subdomain) is a simple matter. I’ll do all of the registration work while I load the OS on the machine.

The Operating System

My time is short, so I need something that comes ready as a web server out of the box. Since I need all open-source web management components, it’s almost a no-brainer to go for a LAMP server, that is, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Just need to find a Linux Distribution that comes with LAMP pre-installed. Since that narrows it down to a few hundred distributions, I’ll go with one I’ve used before: Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution to start using as a workstation, we’ll see how well it does as a web server. It’s ease of LAMP-component installation is mostly what I’m interested in.

While downloading the Ubuntu x86 Install CD (617MB!), I’ll register the external subdomain and prep one of the computers I have lying around with the newest used power supply, max memory and newest used hard drives I have. After that, I’ll look far a baseline Content Management system that will form the core framework of my website.

Summary

Time Spent in this article: 20 minutes
Time remaining for project: 580 minutes
Goals accomplished in this article:

• Prepared for external and internal access to future machine
• Found solution for OS, Web Server and Web Application support
• Readied machine for implementation

The concept of Rapid Prototyping in manufacturing is fairly simple: get an idea and bang it out to see if it fits your application.

In the same sense, for someone as myself who has to be a jack of many trades (NetAdmin, TechSupport, WebDesign, HelpDesk, etc.), I don’t have a lot of time to develop anything substantial as far as web applications are concerned. The bad part, though, is that I see an enormous potential for web applications at my organization.

Some of this potential I see comes from the fact that I’m always looking to bring the best tools to the job, and enjoy using communications tools to utilize my organization’s strong points. I also end up finding great tools while searching for others. Even if you don’t have a need for a web application or multiple applications in your organization, just the process of seeing what’s out there may just get the wheels turning to something that is really out of this world!

In the next few postings, I will be commenting as I build an Extranet/Intranet system for my organization. Here will be the requirements for this project, possibly subject to review as I go along. I recommend these criteria for anyone interested in rapid web development:

• All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must be as close as possible to the organization’s current business model. Additional tools that fit the organization’s business model, but are not currently used, are encouraged
• All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must be at a usability level equal to the least-qualified of its users
• All software/web applicaions used in the development of the project must be either Open Source, in an established Open Format or 100% free to anyone who would like to use it. This includes everything from the Operating System on the server to database management to web content services to FTP tools, etc. This is done to keep material costs as low as possible.
• All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must support Single Sign-On (SSO)
• The maximum development time on this project will be no more than 2 weeks (10 business days) and for no more than 60 minutes per day (a maximum of 600 minutes, or 10 hours total development time). The Extranet/Intranet project must be in the production environment with the users trained on how to use it at the end of the time limit. (With the $30/hour I usually charge people for web development on my own time, this puts the entire solution cost at $450 + material costs)

Seems a little crazy now that I look at it. Oh, and one final thing: I’m going to be doing this for real. I manage a small school district with 3 campuses on a WAN. This will be a production-grade Extranet/Intranet for an educational environment. Unfortunately for me, the rules listed above were for a corporate Extranet/Intranet, but that just covers my office staff. I’ll have to account for teachers, parents and students.

Might run out of time before I can customize anything. Let’s find out…

In this podcast, there is a great discussion of the future of multimedia recordings, it’s really worth a listen, and has some good ideas:
IT Conversations: Jamais Cascio – Personal Memory Assistants

One thing that really struck me was the potential for a “PMA” device to be an anti-corruption device. I thought I’d hash out a quick plan for one:

• A waterproof enclosure like an iPod mini, but a smaller LCD can be substituted for our purposes.
• With the smaller LCD, an embedded 802.11n (once it comes out) antenna could be installed in the device, to provide near-constant (theoretical) 540 Mbit/s wireless access.
• A mic-in jack, for a lapel-microphone.
• A fuel cell battery, not unlike the ones currently in development for mobile phones.
• A one-inch 20GB Hitachi microdrive, the same size as the iPod mini.

Basically, the idea would be to have this voice recorder running embedded Linux. The device could be set to turn on when the user was ‘on the clock’, and turn off when they weren’t. Audio would be recorded to the device, and would be sent via encrypted VPN over the 802.11n network at regular intervals, say, in 5-minute ‘chunks’

Of course, the device would have to be able to transmit using only government-approved VPN encryption standards, and there would be a secure installation on the other side of the VPN connection that would be storing these transcripts.

This solution might also be good for people who want to cover themselves if they are in high-liability situations, such as celebrities, lawyers, etc. In addition, with the added ability to triangulate on the device via 802.11n, (methods already exist for tracing it’s geographical location any time it is online) this device could be used to ensure probation, house arrest, and other law enforcement. The signals could also be tagged with the geographic location when they are sent at the 5-minute intervals, so that the audio could be searchable by location. (You could call up all of your activity when you were at “XYZ corporation’s” main office, for example)

The hard drive space also opens the device up for video capturing also, which could be helpful to surgeons, etc. Depending on the video transmission rate, a Bluetooth-enabled earpiece with video and audio inputs could be made. This brings a host of other problems, however, as the signals would have to be sent encrypted via Bluetooth to the base unit, and powering audio, video and encryption in a small device could prove challenging. However, this would open up a world of possibility! With a video-compliant version of Riya (for example), you would be able to search on “Grandma”, and replay every moment you shared with her, without having to manually go back and tag the video. Or possibly search for “XYZ Contract”, and replay that verbal contract that you now need evidence of…

The device should probably be accessible via a Mini-B USB 2.0 or preferably a 9-pin FireWire 800 for firmware upgrades and programming. It should be stressed, however, that the ability to lock out the user from tampering should be preserved to enable the device to be able to perform as an ‘honesty check’ when used with felons or government employees.

Any other earth-changing ideas? Let’s hear them!

This posting is part of a series from a speech made in 1961 by then-president Eisenhower. It accurately warns the citizens of the Untied States of the times to come, the time when the military and sociological agenda of the Untied States would be dictated by military industry. At the time, this was corporate America. In modern times, this speech rings painfully true as an unheeded warning to the level of control corporate America now holds on our country.

I post this speech not as a criticism of our current government, but as a criticism of the control it has allowed itself to fall under, and the losses, both physical and ideological, which we have suffered.

—–

So — in this my last good night to you as your President — I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I — my fellow citizens — need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation’s great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

This posting is part of a series from a speech made in 1961 by then-president Eisenhower. It accurately warns the citizens of the Untied States of the times to come, the time when the military and sociological agenda of the Untied States would be dictated by military industry. At the time, this was corporate America. In modern times, this speech rings painfully true as an unheeded warning to the level of control corporate America now holds on our country.

I post this speech not as a criticism of our current government, but as a criticism of the control it has allowed itself to fall under, and the losses, both physical and ideological, which we have suffered.

—–

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war — as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years — I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

This posting is part of a series from a speech made in 1961 by then-president Eisenhower. It accurately warns the citizens of the Untied States of the times to come, the time when the military and sociological agenda of the Untied States would be dictated by military industry. At the time, this was corporate America. In modern times, this speech rings painfully true as an unheeded warning to the level of control corporate America now holds on our country.

I post this speech not as a criticism of our current government, but as a criticism of the control it has allowed itself to fall under, and the losses, both physical and ideological, which we have suffered.

—–

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

This posting is part of a series from a speech made in 1961 by then-president Eisenhower. It accurately warns the citizens of the Untied States of the times to come, the time when the military and sociological agenda of the Untied States would be dictated by military industry. At the time, this was corporate America. In modern times, this speech rings painfully true as an unheeded warning to the level of control corporate America now holds on our country.

I post this speech not as a criticism of our current government, but as a criticism of the control it has allowed itself to fall under, and the losses, both physical and ideological, which we have suffered.

—–
(emphasis mine)

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

This posting is part of a series from a speech made in 1961 by then-president Eisenhower. It accurately warns the citizens of the Untied States of the times to come, the time when the military and sociological agenda of the Untied States would be dictated by military industry. At the time, this was corporate America. In modern times, this speech rings painfully true as an unheeded warning to the level of control corporate America now holds on our country.

I post this speech not as a criticism of our current government, but as a criticism of the control it has allowed itself to fall under, and the losses, both physical and ideological, which we have suffered.

—–

Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology — global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle — with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research — these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs — balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage — balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.