svnlogger v0.1

This one is for the Unix freaks (that includes me !).  Remember the textual “ChangeLog” files we used to see in a lot of open source softwares ? It used to have the list of changes made to the software along with revisions number, contributor’s name and timestamp. I always liked the format of a particular kind of ChangeLog which showed all the details in a compact manner without losing any, helps me keep track of ‘What’s new!’ in my next version of the software. Anyways, so how do I make it ? For those of you who have been thinking that they’re hand-written, you’re so wrong ! After all, how can you expect an open source freak to do something ‘manually’ when he can easily automate any task in his computer using cool scripts ?? Anyways, usually they have some kind of Version Tracking System like CVS, SVN or GIT. I happen to use SVN most of the time, actually always, and since I needed to maintain a ChangeLog as well, I found there was a nice command called “svn log” which would generate a textual log of all the commits along with all the information I needed to see. Well, everything was there, but not in a way I wanted it to be. ‘svn log’ is good enough for ‘grep’ but not so good in terms of direct readability. So I wrote this small shell script that is basically a wrapper around the svn log but it uses AWK to reformat the data in a way I like it !

Copy paste the code below into a file called ‘svnlogger.sh’ and then execute it like

> sh svnlogger.sh <path-to-svn-repo> <path-to-changelog>

Perfect configuration for Conky

Okay, this one’s about some eye candy. One thing I regretted while parting my ways with Ubuntu was the good looking themes and applets it had. But no more, as they say, ‘thou shall seek, thou shall find’ and I’ve found whatever I needed in Arch Linux. After configuring everything, from kernel modules to gnome, I finally came to peace with the last missing piece in my puzzle – the Conky system monitor. Configuring it to suit the looks of my desktop was a hell of a task but I finally succeeded thanks to numerous tutorials on the internet and needless to say, google. For starters, Conky is just a system monitor that can be configured to monitor everything from your CPU’s temperature to internet speed to processes and hard disk space. You can even configure it to monitor your email or some RSS feeds you like. And the best part, is the looks, okay, take a look :

Upgrading to PHP 5.3 in Ubuntu

I’ve been using PHP 5.2 for a long time now. I’m not so apt towards change but PHP 5.3 has some cool features which I needed very much for my projects. So yesterday I decided to do that conversion. The process was not at all so simple and it took lots of googling and searching the forums, especially for removing the post-installation bugs. Finally, at Dec 27 12:45 AM I achieved 100% transformation to PHP 5.3. As my usual habit, I like documenting the stuff I do, so here it goes.

First thing before starting the process is to make sure that none of my existing projects would break. Because as the developers have said, PHP 5.3 is a major release with lots of changes. Many new features were added while many were removed or deprecated. And to avoid getting unnecessary warnings or notices, it was better to recheck my codes for compatibility with PHP 5.3. The PHP developers have written a good page in the PHP Manual which tells in detail about the things to take care of when migrating to 5.3 from 5.2. You can check it here : http://php.net/manual/en/migration53.php

So don’t forget to go through that page once, at the least the section which tells about the “removed and deprecated” features in PHP 5.3 and use the alternatives as suggested. Now you’re ready to upgrade. BUT, before that, you’ve to know that any software you use like phpMyAdmin or ldapPhpAdmin which uses PHP might broke. Well, you cannot do anything about it but you’ll have to reinstall them. Anyways, moving ahead, take a backup copy of your php.ini configuration file. You may need it for reconfiguring your PHP 5.3. If you’re using Apache 2, it can be found in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Now, just run the following commands one by one,

Quickly configuring an LDAP + NFS client in Fedora

Recently I needed to configure 6 PCs for a central workplace. I needed central authentication as well as Network File System(NFS) on all those machines. All this was to facilitate the people of my technical club (the “Delta Force” Webteam) to use those machines for working on collaborative projects. The central authentication assured that I can easily manage user accounts from say, an LDAP server i.e. I can disable login of a user in a client machine or create a new user without having to touch the client machine at all. Similarly, NFS assured that no matter in which of those 6 machines the user logs in, he will always see the same files in his home directory and same configurations like his background-image, firefox addons, etc on that machine as if he always used the same computer for all his work. This eliminates the problem of people complaining that the machine in which their files resides are being used by someone else.

So my overall network configuration has the following prototype :

1) 6 client machines in which user will be able to login (Subnet of the machines : 10.1.39.0/24)
2) An LDAP server ( IP : 10.0.0.163 ) to take care of authentication when user logs into a client machine
3) The LDAP base DN which has the list of all users is ou=people,ou=delta,dc=ldap.delta.nitt,dc=edu
4) An NFS server ( IP : 10.0.0.126 ) which has the user home-directories of all users inside /webteam folder.
Overall working : When a user (say “jereme”) logs into a client machine, his username and password are checked from the LDAP server at 10.0.0.163. If authentication is successful, he’s logged into the machine and his home directory is actually mounted from /webteam/jereme in the NFS server at 10.0.0.126.

I assume you already have the fully configured LDAP and NFS servers since this article is only about configuring the “clients”. So here we go. Pick any of your client machines and do the following :

First we will configure NFS client. For this purpose, we will use the autofs package.