July 2009 – Page 5 – Kev's Development Toolbox

July 8, 2009

Google working on Chrome based OS

It’s been long rumored that Google were working on an OS, and maybe the launch of the Google phones through people of the scent slightly. But it was true, Google announced last night they are building a lightweight OS based on their Linux and their Chrome browser as the basis, supported by the raft of other apps/technologies they have been slowly rolling out.

The OS will be targeted to netbook type devices, and will run the majority of apps from the cloud, like Google Docs etc, rather than on the machine itself, but with Google Gears providing offline capability they’ve got their bases covered.

Funny how Microsoft has tried this approach twice and never managed to make it stick – first with the Hailstorm initiative, hosting apps and data online, and secondly with their half-hearted live.com attempt that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere right now.

More details here.

July 7, 2009

Online store/photo gallery using PixelPost

In my copious spare time I take a ton of photos, and recently decided to put a gallery site together and link to ‘Print on Demand’ sites to offer a few of my best for sale.

Installation and setup of PixelPost to my Apache server and MySQL was incredibly easy, and here’s a link to my live site.

July 2, 2009

Setting up Nagios system monitoring on Ubuntu8.1 server

Latest package is nagios3 – to install:

<code>sudo apt-get install nagios3

A good article on setup and config is here.

To restart the Nagios server after making config changes: sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart

Resolving CGI auth issues

Part of the install instructions above told me to create a user ‘nagios’, but the default config is setup to allow ‘nagiosadmin’ access to monitor services. Accessing the wepages you get this:

<code>"It appears as though you do not have permission to view information for
any of the hosts you requested... If you believe this is an error, check
the HTTP server authentication requirements for accessing this CGI and
check the authorization options in your CGI configuration file."</code>

To fix this, edit /etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg, and replace ‘nagiosadmin’ everywhere with ‘nagios’ (assuming the user you created was called ‘nagios’)

July 2, 2009

Windows 7 ‘Start up repair’ – Cancel cannot cancel

If you startup Windows 7 beta and press F8, which used to take you into ‘Safe Mode’ in prior versions, the only option you have now is a ‘Repair Mode’ which attempts to do something to repair your install. While it’s running there is a dialog with a Cancel button on it. If you press it it says ‘The repair operation cannot be cancelled’. Hmm – that’s useful. A bit more polish needed there I think.