Luke Sheldrick’s Blog

A friend told me of a magical cross platform application, which I’ve been using for a while, thought I’d share. Synergy;

“Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). ”

The picture above shows my very small desk, sporting 2x 22 Samsungs, and my Dell D420. Under the desk is an old HP desktop powering the two monitors (and soon to be 9′ touch screen above them, when I get the drivers setup). I rarely use the D420 these days, as I use my MacBook or Advent 4213 notebook when out and about, so didn’t mind giving it up to the desk.

I can use the keyboard and mouse on the laptop, to control both it, and the bigger screens. The neat thing is, with the config setup correctly, I can just move the mouse upwards and the pointer magically moves to the other screen, and the keyboard then controls that computer too. A few other neat options are to have a shared clipboard, and to activate the screensaver/lock screen across all computers with each other.

So on my tiny desk, I can fit in quite a lot of screen real estate. As for using the laptop as a primary keyboard, I started to do this at work when the hotdesk keyboards started to freak me out, and using the laptop keyboard is actually quite nice to use.

Have tested Synergy with os x, and all worked pretty flawlessly there too. Not had a chance to test under windows just yet, as rarely use it these days, but from what I’ve read it all works fine.

In addition to moving my dns, to my self hosted infrastructure, I am also moving quite a few things away from hosting on Windows.

I eventually want to get rid of my Exchange 2007 server, as to be honest it is so much of a resource hog, and for a small user implementation, it’s far too OTT. I need to find a suitable alternative to sync all my devices with however (Laptop(s), iPhone, various Windows Mobiles) I am sure there is something out there that will do the job.

As for this blog, it was hosted on a Windows 2003 Server, the same one as the Exchange server, where performance isn’t great. So now it’s hosted on one of my Linux (Fedora) servers. I am quite happy with the transition, other than a lot of the asp back ends, now have to be re-written in perl or something similar… effort.

I am not too sure if it’s performance has been improved… let me know

Finally, some clever geek type person has writen a set of tools to be able to mount these horrid things under *nix.

I bought mine a couple of years back, bud didn’t realise you had to use a horrid sluggish windows app to be able to mount the thing.

Netgear use a tool called “Z-SAN” under windows.

However you can now mount the drives under *nix, there are a few draw backs however, you first have to partition te drives under windows, not a huge problem, as my desktop is a dual boot.

Secondly you can’t use passwords on the device. Again not a huge problem, I just stuck it on it’s own vlan, and restricted access to it, so only my linux NAS server could see it.

Then on my NAS server (FC9 + NFS + SMB) I used the utils the toolset provides, mounted the two drives, formatted, and mounted. Bob is your mothers brother it all works.

I just share the drives out now using my existing NAS (NFS + SMB) and supprisingly works really well.

Time will see how stable they are.

If you want to do this too, the code can be found at google code:

http://code.google.com/p/sc101-nbd/

Well tonight decided that both the XP / Vista (dual boot) installed on my main desktop at home were too annoying and memory hogging.

Decided to give a Linux distro a go, as have become quite accustomed recently to the unix way of doing things (well have a few cent servers running, and have a macbook).

Went for Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), and after fighting with it to play nicely with my nVidia graphics card, and Dual HP monitors, it seems pretty cool.

Still gotta get it to play with my web cam (shouldn’t be too difficult) and my Asus TV Tuner card, which so far doesn’t look too promising on the t’internet.

Oh and… can’t sleep again. Grr!

Last week, I started working on a new mail platform. I had in place, an Exchange 2003 box at home, and a backup mail server running Exim, based in Global Switch London.

I utilised Greylisting on both, however found the linux version ten times better. So set myself a task to setup a new front end, in front of my main Exchange box. Ruled out getting rid of it totally, as I personally prefer the features of Exchange (Push mail, calanders…etc).

So I setup a virtual machine (CentOS 4.4) on one of my virtual hosts, configured exim, with greylisting, and to relay all mail to my domains, to the internal IP of my Exchange box. I also wanted to setup a test Exchange 2008 box at the same time, so anything to my development domain, would go to a different internal IP.

After a few tweaks, magically it all worked… until I started to get NDR’s  stating that mail was being delayed to my domain. A few telnet tests later, discovered that if you connected from a host with no rDNS, my mail server took 30 seconds to time out doing a reverse DNS check. Many mail servers would have timed out by this time. A quick tweak of my exim config to lower the DNS time out, from 30 seconds to 5, cured the problem.

For anyone wanting to do this, edit the exim.conf lines

rfc1413_hosts = *
rfc1413_query_timeout = 30s

to

rfc1413_hosts = *
rfc1413_query_timeout = 5s