Pavel Titov's Blog

Request Tracker Installation on CentOS 5 / RHEL 5

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:42:57 +0300

This tutorial assumes database server for the tracker is already up and running on a same or another machine. The tutorial based on RHEL 4 Install Guide and another one guide slightly modified to conform CentOS 5 / RHEL 5 changes and facilitate software installation. Apache2/mod_perl2 with RT 3.8 are used in the tutorial. You may want to review Manual Installation Requirements and Manual Installation to get a grip of the installation process.

Perform a standard install of CentOS 5 or RHEL 5. Enable "centosplus" repository in the /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo. Download and install RPMforge distribution.

Wi-Fi Positioning Goes to Moscow

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:33:51 +0300

I've tried Wi2Geo positioning service a few days ago—cool, it works. It pointed my location very accurate—missed just about 20 m.

Wi2Geo is a Wi-Fi navigation service. Currently it works in Moscow, but they're going to add other major Russian cities to the database. The idea is: knowing Wi-Fi access points locations (there usually a few available in most locations in Moscow city) and signal strength one can calculate Wi-Fi device location.

Scandinavian Calligraphy

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:58:41 +0300

Having been on holidays in Denmark last summer, I was astonished by wide use of calligraphy. Modern Scandinavians handwrite instead of using Times New Roman and a printer.

Here is a typical banner in a shop:

Helsignor, 2007.

Editing HP iPAQ Voice Messenger 514 Dialplan

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 01:12:47 +0300

I bought iPAQ 514 Voice Messenger phone recently. It successfully connected to our corporate IP PBX on CommuniGate Pro after a little SIP configuration, but I didn't like the default dial plan.

Most numbers in my phone book recorded in an international format with some Russian-style dashes and brackets, like +7 (495) 246-24-73. To dial such numbers standard dial plan has to be modified.

Xen on amd64

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:06:20 +0300

Recently we at BHOST.RU were deploying VPS and DDS hosting and I conducted some Xen tests on our amd64 boxes. General impression is: it works fine and stable enough for production use.

Xen is a so-called virtual machine monitor. It's able to run VMs in both paravirtualization (when guest OS core modified to communicate with host OS) and hardware virtualization (guest OS runs unmodified and virtualization handled by a virtualization-compatible CPU) modes. Xen is open-source, but there are also commercial VMMs in the market - Microsoft Virtual Server and VMWare Server.

We run Xen on quad core Inte Core2 servers under a CentOS 5 Linux (it's actually free RHEL build, but it's an open secret). Also we have an Intel Xeon 5120 server for our internal needs, it works just the same.