Until I followed a link from a twitter friend I had never heard of this term.

As a small time programmer I am always looking for ways to improve the code that I do and I also look at ways to improve myself as a programmer. Code kata is certainly a generic approach at these goals that is worth reading about.

Not everything they propose I will be able to try right away. It all depends on your environment.

It is more than just practicing at solving specific coding puzzle. It is about learning the tools that you use, communicating with the people that are around you, reading code that others do and try to maintain it, getting code reviews and much more.

I have to sit down and write what I will do to improve my programming ways. What I think easily make sense and that I can do rapidly:

1. read about new features in Eclipse
2. read about codig algorithm in Java
3. learn Python
4. I have to ask a programmer at work to review some of my code

If I can get those done in the next month I will see some improvement for sure.

I was reading an article today about this piece of software and I taught that it was quite interesting. You can see all the parts of a swing application in this swing debugger. For someone like me that is not always sure how all the parts are linked together it is a quick visual view. Worth a try for sure.

Ref:

• https://swingexplorer.dev.java.net/

Found a post that explained what was needed to disable ipv6 on our installation of RHEL5.

The only thing that we really need is to add a line in /etc/modprobe.conf

alias net-pf-10 ipv6 off

Simple enough!

Ref:

• http://www.vincentverhagen.nl/2007/06/22/disable-ipv6-on-red-hat/

We started testing some NIC bonding on our RHEL 5 VM and we will be testing on real hardware soon. The ultimate goal is to add this setup in our kickstart file.

We created these files for testing:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0

DEVICE=bond0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no

Added these lines to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1:

MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes

in /etc/modprobe.conf we added these lines:

alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 miimon=100 mode=1

We just need to test on some physical servers and see how all this works now.

Reference:

• http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/rhel5/rhel5_administration/rhel5_s1-modules-ethernet.html#s2-modules-bonding
• http://mergy.org/tag/rhel-5/

I found a few documents on the Internet about what I needed to do to rebuild the DVD to integrate my kickstart file. Unfortunately none of the solution had all the needed command in one place for my setup to work so here is my cookbook from the different sources.

First I mounted the dvdrom with the CentOS DVD to /mnt/cdrom:

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

Then I copied a few files:

• cd /tmp
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/isolinux ./
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/CentOS ./isolinux/
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/* ./isolinux/ [say yes to overwrite the TRANS.TBL]
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/.discinfo ./isolinux/
• cp ks.cfg /tmp/isolinux/

For my RHEL5.1 rebuild I did similar commands but the paths are a bit different:

• cd /tmp
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/isolinux ./
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/Server ./isolinux/
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/VT ./isolinux/
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/images ./isolinux/
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/Cluster ./isolinux/
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/ClusterStorage ./isolinux/
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/* ./isolinux/ [say yes to overwrite the TRANS.TBL]
• cp -R /mnt/cdrom/.discinfo ./isolinux/
• cp ks.cfg /tmp/isolinux/

I had to edit the isolinux.cfg (in the isolinux directory) to change a couple of lines:

• the “default linux” line became “default ks“
• The 2 line after “label ks” went from “append ks initrd=initrd.img” to “append ks=cdrom:/ks.cfg initrd=initrd.img“

The isolinux.cfg file now looks like:

default ks
prompt 1
timeout 600
display boot.msg
F1 boot.msg
F2 options.msg
F3 general.msg
F4 param.msg
F5 rescue.msg
label linux
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.img
label text
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.img text
label ks
kernel vmlinuz
append ks=cdrom:/ks.cfg initrd=initrd.img
label local
localboot 1
label memtest86
kernel memtest
append -

To build the ISO (all this on one line):

mkisofs -o centos5-dvd1.iso -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -r -R -J -V “CentOS 5.1 (CentOS) Disk1″ -A “CentOS 5.1 (CentOS) Disk1″ -p “Cinq” -T isolinux/

For Red Hat Entreprise Linux 5.1 I had to change the label for the DVD from “CentOS 5.1 (CentOS) Disk1″ to “RHEL_5.1 x86_64 DVD” (obviously I am using the x64 version for RHEL5) so the command became:

mkisofs -o centos5-dvd1.iso -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -r -R -J -V “RHEL_5.1 x86_64 DVD” -A “RHEL_5.1 x86_64 DVD” -p “Cinq” -T isolinux/

Reference sites:

• http://www.techonthenet.com/linux/centos4_update.php
• https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?viewmode=flat&order=ASC&topic_id=3635&forum=27&move=next&topic_time=1149676608
• http://blog.nominet.org.uk/tech/2005/09/19/building-a-redhat-enterprise-linux-serial-console-boot-dvd/
• http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/en-US/System_Administration_Guide/Kickstart_Installations-Kickstart_Options.html
• http://nootech.wordpress.com/2007/12/11/build-a-custom-centos-5-install-cd/

It was time for an update. New presentation, new tools to post the content I wanted to put in this site.

This piece of software seems quite promising to solve some of the issues that I have on my desk. I would like different computer to integrate a bit better and the main 2 features promise just that: software kvm and shared clipboard. I will have to test Synergy on my main Linux desktop with either my Mac and the Windows laptop or maybe a second Linux desktop. I need more screen space on my desk.

Special effect for Linux is at the Beryl Project. I will be trying this in a VMWare with KUbuntu. May make me switch distro…

OpenProj is a nice application to do project management. All done in Java so it works on all my workstations.

Read a few articles today and taught that these 2 things were interesting: Vixta and Zonbu. I wish Vixta had some Tablet PC features because I would be reformating my tablet PC in no time. Vista is just a pain. It amazes me that you can go backward with an upgrade. Zonbu is a nice PC but I am not looking for hosted storage. I want a small quiet PC with Linux.