When you add a new service to an SELinux-enabled server, it may fail to work due to the local Linux policy.

This document describes how to add the necessary rules to the local policy to allow the service to work.

The example used is getting MySQL clustering to work on a FC4 server.

I have (hare-brained) plans for a business venture which would involve large amounts of storage. So, I thought I'd have a play around with iSCSI, mdadm, and lvm on a couple of linux boxes to see how it works.

I needed to run slimserver on a Windows XP laptop.

I wanted to use the latest code from svn, but I also wanted to run slimserver as a Windows service.

This article describes how to do it.

I occasionally come across.flac files that have ID3 tags in them (as well as Vorbis comments).

This seems to confuse The Godfather (my tag editor of choice) so I need to remove them.

Ok, I finally got something working. I decided to work through the example in Dave Thomas' book 'Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide'

(This book is not officially released until July 2005 but the authors have released a "beta" version in PDF format)

The example uses MySQL but I have translated the MySQL SQL code to Postgresql code.

My first attempts at using Rails with MySQL weren't all that successful - I'm not sure why. However, as I intend to use Postresql in the long run, I decided to install the Rails Postgresql adapter.

Every time I come back to postgresql I always struggle with getting the authentication set up so I've decided to document it!

I quite fancy getting up to speed with Ruby On Rails as it looks like a very powerful web app development environment. I'll probably end up running this from lighttpd, but that's one learning curve too many so, for now, I decided to get it running on my Fedora Core 4 box running Apache 2.

Here's what I did.

Since buying a Squeezebox, I have been steadily ripping all my CDs into FLAC format.

However, I also have an iPod and the iPod can not play back FLAC files, and even if it could, MP3 files are a lot smaller and good enough quality for mobile use.

I needed some way to convert my large FLAC collection to MP3, and came up with a perl script, imaginatively entitled "flac2mp3".

Please see the flac2mp3 webpage:

http://robinbowes.com/projects/flac2mp3

I am pleased to announce that at 09:59 today, 24th November 2004, my sister Jenny gave birth to a baby boy.

He weighed in at 6lb 11oz. No name has been chosen as yet, so I suggested "Bobsie" :)

Mother and baby are doing well and she could be home tomorrow.

Congratulations Jenny and Mark!

First pictures are here.