Do you know XMing?

Sometime ago I was thinking to buy a Sun Sparc workstation. I always liked the Sun Blade 1000/2000 series but the last year the prices of Blade 1500/2500 were going down. Now you can buy a Sun Blade 2500 very cheap.

But before buy a new machine -and look for space at home- I decided to play a little more with my Sun Fire V120. I have a PGX32 VGA card for it and changued the fans for a new low noise ones but what I wanted to do is to connect to the server with an X server.

A quick search in the web and I found an small list of X servers for Windows (I have Vista on my laptop), most of them paid systems with a lot of functions. One of them is free: XMing. This is a very little tool but very useful. Just install XMing on your Window machine and you can connect to the server. More info here.

I didn't need any special cofiguration n the V120: it was reinstalled with the latest Sun Solaris -sorry, Oracle Solaris now- at the end of 2010 and nothing more was done.

The process of open a new connection is very easy:

 - Start XLaunch. At the first screen I choose 'One Window'. The display number must be 10.

  - At the second screen select 'Open session via XDMCP'.

 The next step is to indicate the server address. Type the ip address of  the server or select "Search" if you only have one.

  - I leave the "additional parameters" values as default.

  - Now you can save the configuration in a file to reuse it (I saved it on the desktop to use as a fast link).

And here you are my Solaris login screen on my laptop

This is not a fast way to work with an Sparc workstation but it's enough to play with Java desktop or CDE:

How to enable AWStats on Strongbolt

Today I started to play with my backup RaQ 4 server. It's loaded with Strongbolt and looking at the hard disk I found that AWStats is installed by default but pointing a web browser to www.myaddress.net/awstats only gave me an small box asking for a user and password but never I was able to log in.

I remembered there is a post in the Strongbolt forums but with no good solution. A new search and I found this on the closed Nuonce Forums. In fact Strongbolt has AWStats installed but is missing one perl library that is needed to authenticate users in the systems: perl-suidperl.

Just need to install this library and then you can log with the vsite admin password:

[root@web etc]# yum install perl-suidperl

Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
update        100% =========================    951 B 00:00
BlueQuartz 100% =========================    951 B 00:00
base           100% =========================   1.1 kB 00:00
addons       100% =========================    951 B 00:00
extras         100% =========================   1.1 kB 00:00
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Excluding Packages from CentOS-4 - Updates
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-4 - Base
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-4 - Addons
Finished
Excluding Packages from CentOS-4 - Extras
Finished
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
> Downloading header for perl-suidperl to pack into transaction set.
perl-suidperl-5.8.5-53.el    100% =========================    20 kB 00:00
> Package perl-suidperl.i386 3:5.8.5-53.el4 set to be updated
> Running transaction check

Dependencies Resolved

================================================================
Package                Arch            Version              Repository                 Size
================================================================
Installing:
 perl-suidperl         i386             3:5.8.5-53.el4    update                       112 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================
Install 1 Package(s)
Update 0 Package(s)
Remove 0 Package(s)
Total download size: 112 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
(1/1): perl-suidperl-5.8.    100% =========================     112 kB 00:00
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
  Installing: perl-suidperl ######################### [1/1]

Installed: perl-suidperl.i386 3:5.8.5-53.el4
Complete!
[root@web etc]#

Remeber that lo log in the Statistics page tou need the vsite admin usr and password, not the server admin password!