Install Postgres 8.4 on a RHEL 5.5 Derivative

Continuing with the series of 'basics' type posts, I'll cover getting Postgres up and running on Scientific Linux. A little something on the motivation for these posts... it's not because I've found something unique or amazing, it's more a reminder for myself on how to do some things. Which allows me to replace all this info in my memory with a simple pointer to the info :). The other motivation is to consolidate information... I ran into a few self-inflicted issues when doing this first time around, and found there were many guides out there for specific pieces but not an overall one that covered everything I wanted to do. So read on if you're interested!

Not Just Another Fucking 2011 Prediction Post

In fact, it's not a prediction post at all - it's just a list of things I would like to see happen or at least start happening this year. I'm not making any guesses as to whether they will or not, you can decide for yourselves what the likelihood of each is.

Adding Disks via LVM

In my last post, I mentioned that I like to use a 4GB disk for my root volume on any Linux VM's... this is mainly for local / dev environments, where you want to cram as many VM's as possible into a small space. But sometimes you need more space, in which case you can add another disk. This isn't as straight forward with lvm as it is without, so here's a nice easy step by step to help you get there after you have added a new disk to the VM. In this case, we are adding a new 2GB disk that will be configured as a new logical volume (you could of course just add to an existing volume if you wanted). We'll then format it with ext3 and mount it at /usr/local/pgsql/data.

Minimal RHEL 5.5 / CentOS 5.5 Install

After messing around with Ubuntu for a while, I decided it would be a little more portable for me to use a Red Hat based distro as my primary Linux environment. My distro of choice is actually Scientific Linux, which is developed / maintained by CERN. Why not CentOS? Frankly, Scientific Linux doesn't have any of the bullshit that CentOS does, and is for all intents and purposes identical.

Oddly enough, there is no "JeOS" option for RHEL based distro's like there is for Ubuntu. Amazon recently launched their own RHEL derivative which I thought might give me some clues as to how minimal a RHEL based distro could be, however a quick yum list installed proved it to be far from minimal - disk is cheaper than the combination of network and CPU it seems, so they cram many development packages into the base image (OpenJDK, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, X etc). Which is not really a huge deal to be honest, but I like to keep things as small as possible without getting ridiculous.

I'm Baaaaaack!

Heheh. Well after a few years of dedicated hosting, it was clear that I didn't need it. So here I am back at Blogger, hopefully to stay this time :)

New vinternals Site, Burning Feed...

I really need to bite the bullet on this one and move to my new wordpress based site. In the next few hours I will revert the current site to it's default vinternals.blogspot.com address, so the RSS feeds should still work. Then later this evening I'll point the vinternals.com domain at the new site. Finally, in the next day or 2 I'll burn the feeds from this site. If you haven't seen anything from me by next Sunday, either it's all gone horribly wrong or you need to update your RSS bookmark.

Hmmm, it seems putting the word burn all over the place has resulted in ads for "sexy singles" to temporarily appear on the site. Will have to use that word more often :D

Getting from Nice to Cannes / Cannes to Nice

VMworld Europe 2009 is only 1 week away, woohoo! I'm certainly getting pretty excited about it, so I thought I'd post up some info for anyone who is getting into Nice outside of the VMware provided bus times and travelling on their own dime or on restricted company dime (times are tough, I suspect most of us are lucky to be going at all).

The buses services around the Cote d'Azur are great - I've taken them a few times during various jaunts to the area and been amazed at what you get for a basic 1€ ticket. From Nice Airport, you have 2 options for buses - the 1€ Cannes RN7 (bus number 200, around 90mins journey time along the coast) or the ~15€ "Aeroport Express" (bus number 210, around 50mins journey time via the highway).

Here is a link to the timetable, route and departure location info for all buses departing from Nice Aeroport (might be worth saving the Bus 200 and Bus 210 pdf's to your phone / laptop / ipod). Below is a screeny from the Nice Aeroport website with some basic info on the Bus services to Cannes.



UPDATE Hit the comments for direct links to the Bus 200 timetable and route info PDF. Thanks Anonymous, and sorry to hear you won't be there.