Olivier's Blog

A little shameless plug, but this is important. If you are Canadian and want things to change, click on the banner bellow. You can find more information on their website before signing the letter.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Personal at 12:06 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Please welcome... wait for it... my new blog! (you need to use Barney Stinson's voice for that phrase)

Ok, so what's the catch? It looks like the other one, what's different? In fact, what changed is the machine behind.

After many problems with ServerPronto, I decived to move everything back in Canada. My new hosting company is now iWeb, right here in Montreal. I wasn't sure at first, since iWeb is a little bit more expensive than others. After trying it, I am more than pleased with the service.

For example, when installing my dedicated server, I wanted to switch my Debian to Gentoo. I knew it was risky, but I needed my server to run Gentoo, mainly for seldom ebuild development. Everything ran smoothly, but I unfortunately made a typo in the network config file. Upon reboot, I couldn't access the machine and was stuck with a bricked server.

With a simple support ticket, I was able to get an IP KVM connected to my server quickly and interacted with it to bring the network back online. It might seem like a trivial event, but I am not sure what would have happened if it was hosted elsewhere. I would have probably ended up paying someone to type the commands on the shell, which is not always an easy task when the other person is more than a thousand kilometers away.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Internet at 09:18 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Following shameless plug from our StartupCFO:

MOBIVOX, the company I am working for, has been nominated for the 2008 Webware 100 Awards in the communication category. Since it would be great to win, if you know about MOBIVOX, have tried it and feel it is a great product, please vote for us!

Posted by Olivier Hill in Computers at 16:02 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

It's finally there... after quite some requests by external people, I've created a doublemetaphone module on PECL.

After some house-keeping, version 0.1.2 was born. It is still alpha, although it should not segfault or anything. The only reason going alpha is because I'm not sure the API should stay the same. After some feedbacks, I'll ramp-up beta and GA.

So, after a pecl install doublemetaphone, you can enjoy using the new double_metaphone() function.

If you have any comments, or found bugs, leave a comment here, or on the PECL bug system.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Internet at 08:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Even if the GeoIP bindings for PHP have been available for more than a year on PECL, I have never took the time to write an ebuild for it on Gentoo.

Until now, I was using the PEAR installer, which is great for installing PECL packages. The only downside is that those packages won't be seen when doing a world upgrade with Gentoo. You then have two choices:

1. Do an emerge world followed by a pecl upgrade-all
2. Install PECL packages via Portage

Since I'm lazy, I like the fact to upgrade everything at one place.

The hard part now is to write the ebuild, which is really simple considering the fact that it is a PECL package and that eclass are available.

One thing to another, this ebuild is now part of the testing overlay for Gentoo. If no bugs are found, it should be part of the normal tree shortly.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Internet at 10:06 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Nothing fancy, but while configuring a Kerberos slave on a Gentoo server, an init script seems to be missing for starting kpropd.

While it seems some have difficulties writing init scripts, here is what I am using:

#!/sbin/runscript

daemon="MIT Kerberos 5 KPROPD"
exec="/usr/sbin/kpropd"

opts="start stop restart"

depend() {
        need net
}

start() {
        ebegin "Starting $daemon"
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec ${exec} -- -S 1>&2
        eend $? "Error starting $daemon"
}

stop() { 
        ebegin "Stopping $daemon"
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --exec ${exec} 1>&2
        eend $? "Error stopping $daemon"
}

restart() {
   svc_stop
   svc_start
}

Posted by Olivier Hill in Internet at 14:58 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)