Recently, I had to set up Samba on a new CentOS 5 system. Samba is used to provide Windows file sharing from non-Windows systems and can be quite a pain to set up. Red Hat, from whom CentOS is derived, has included a default configuration that works pretty well out of the box for what most people use Samba for: sharing home directories.

So, I fired it up and found that I could browse the shares on the server from my Windows XP system, but got the following message when I tried to open one of them (Iris is the name of the file server.):

Iris is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Access is denied.

After beating up Google a bit, I decided to actually journey into the smb.conf file again and noticed that Red Hat had left a comment about SELinux.

Viola! Typing the following solved my problem:
/usr/sbin/setsebool -P samba_enable_home_dirs on

Today I am sitting at the HAmpton Roads Lego Users Group (HARDLUG) table in the midst of FantaSci 2009.  I’ve just finished repairing the LEGO Millenium Falcon and did my best to work with the limited pieces we could find for the LEGO Trade Federation MTT.

HARDLUG does these shows to promote their clandestine LEGO agenda while having fun talking to prospective new recruits.    Also here are the Tidewater Alliance  and a host of vendors.

I noticed when ripping and encoding my CD collection that GRIP crashed on certain CDs. Thinking this had to do with poor handling of CD scratches, I started setting CDs aside.

I should have known better. Having used it for years, I’d never seen this behavior before in GRIP.

It turns out that there is a buffer overflow that manifests itself when the genre of the music is set to something “nonstandard”, so, as a workaround, I have to check and sometimes set the genre on CDs to “Alternative” or another “standard” genre.

This isn’t really a problem solved, but more a problem identified and worked around. There is a patch in Ubuntu to fix this problem, but I guess it hasn’t made it into my version (Intrepid Ibex) yet.

Ref: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grip/+bug/283658

I smacked my head on this one, seeing as one of my previous posts had the same solution.

CentOS 5 does not install php-mysql by default. When the Wordpress installation runs, it disables error reporting for certain functions, presumably so that they can be dealt with later.

Unfortunately, this error reporting doesn’t get dealt with correctly, and instead the end user is presented with a blank page instead of a message telling them that the mysql functions don’t exist.

I’ve got a patch ready for the Wordpress folks, but I’m still waiting for my login to their bug reporting system so I can submit it.

I hope this helps someone else.

In short, if you see a blank screen after putting in your database information during install, make sure that the php-mysql package is installed on CentOS. I spent hours trying to figure out why this wasn’t working right.

Well, it looks like the slow connections I’ve been experiencing with Blogger may be enough to push me back onto my own server. B2Evolution was good to me when I ran it, so I’ll use that software for blog entries. The photos I’ll probably keep on Picasa, but I haven’t given them much thought.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to run my own server for web hosting. It is in the small challenge of doing so that I find some joy. Funny to think that the systems administration that I do could be considered a “hobby”?

There are other things I want to do with the server as well, like limited file sharing, that I have a hard time doing with Google Docs.

So, thanks to a tip from a friend, I’m looking at ServerADay for a discount server that will meet my hosting needs. I’m waiting for one in the $20 range if I can get it. This is a far cry from the almost $100 prices at Serverbeach or the $79 servers at Layered Tech.

Once I get a server, the next issue will be moving the blog over to whatever software I end up using. I’m planning on keeping my Calendar and Email on Google Apps for now, as, with slight annoyances, they’ve been serving me well.

I’m thinking that moving to Blogger was a good experiment, but it did not garner the benefits I had hoped for.