Playing Half-life 2 with NAT on the same server
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For the ones with the same problem me and my brother are having in Half life 2 when connecting from the same external ip, behind NAT, getting disconnections when the other one joins the same server:
clientport 27006
or any other number then 27005
If you want this to be executed by all mods on startup you have to create a autoexec.cfg containing the previous command in every mod config dir found at:
C:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\<username>\<game>\hl2\cfg
Special attention goes to
C:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\<username>\source sdk base\hl2\cfg
as this one is used by a lot of mods as a basis and thus the autoexec.cfg get executed by a lot of games.
Happy fragging with your internet connection sharer!
Registering in is sooo web 1.0
I’m really fond of anonymous or non-registered web sites. If you can please do it, and devise some smart way to not make people to have to register. Registering on yet an other site is annoying and most of the time its totally useless. I don’t want to register just to read your site. This is probably one of the reasons why bugmenot is popular.
But for most interaction you do not need registering either. At some web stores you can make an order by just filling out your personal information, no registering required. This making it easier for other people to contribute or buy. I plan on doing this on my new project, which I will uncover later.
I read some articles about how great OpenID is, and that this makes the login procedure easier, but why not allow anonymous comments on blogs (what it seems to be used the most for) instead of offloading your registration to an other party. OpenID is a big scam to give to phishers something nice to do and make their lives a lot easier.
The thing that came before me
My dad is becoming an old man but has a blog! Sometimes it has some nice projects and recommendations. It’s a nice read.
Awesomeness of last.fm
Last.Fm is a really awesome (to use this vague term) web 2.0 site. This site is in an ideal position in the market. What started as a simple this-is-what-I-listen-to stat site grew to a much larger community site, where people can find and share information about music. People still share their statistics, and this information is used to your own advantage. Music recommendations for example based on what other people listen.
My latest really great experience is this: A Paul Gilbert concert. Last.fm gives you a load of event recommendations based on what you listen. If it wasn’t for Last.fm i would have missed this concert. Now I wonder, do they cooperate with the ticketmaster service? It would make a lot of sense if they did, this is clearly a win-win situation for the site (commission) and for the ticket seller (more costumers) and the user (more concerts!).
Why I choose Gentoo
Gentoo is a source based distribution. Every piece of software is compiled on your own computer. While this can take a long time, and requires a generally fast PC to do it without really bothering you, source based distributions do have major advantages.
Some packages provide compile time options to include functions/features or not, depending on the dependencies you have installed. Like a QT frontend instead of a GTK one. In Gentoo you can choose which you want, unlike binary distributions, where you get a specified futureset. If you don’t like it, you can compile your own outside of the package manager. Which is not desired.
Debian and Ubuntu, have different versions of their distributions. These are testing grounds for newer packages. If you run an older version distribution, and want a package from the newer one, this is most of the time impossible as dependencies do not match. Source distributions allow for better mixture of stable packages and experimental packages as they are compiled against the current dependencies, if a newer one is required it’ll try to pull it in. Binary distros are at a disadvantage here.
Now the Ubuntu fans will scream that they can do this and that. They are stuck to one of the Ubuntu flavors, and what they think is right. Source distributions give you more power over your own system at the expense of longer installation time, which for me is no problem.
Spoke too soon
I’m 3th again… I should post more content regularly.
Top at Google
Maybe it’s because I started using Google Analytics on this blog, which is a very nice thing to do to yourself. you can see if there is activity on your site, see which links users click, where they enter and when they stop looking at your site. I really recommend it if you want to know more about the users on your site.
Also fixed my perma links and I am still making this ********* **** ***** gallery2 plugin to work nicely and stop it from being a bitch. Which isn’t going well…
The Google effect
My nickname, which I thought was a pretty unique one (atleast in it’s spelling) does not seem to be… unique. When I google on my nickname this blog comes in fourth. My Last.fm page is the first and a photo made by dodo of me in a Japanese metro second. Thirdth is some dude which isn’t me, but uses the same nickname as me for his ebay.
My blog is the fourth entry. Which uses the wrong link, it should be this. And I can’t seem to get it much higher. If I really want to, I have to use some form of the much discussed (especially on Digg) Search Engine Optimization, and outrank Last.fm and Ebay on the Drakonen keyword, which will be hard to do if not impossible.
Some output…
drakonen@Gamont ~ $ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md/1 1.1T 56G 989G 6% / drakonen@Gamont ~ $ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md1 : active raid5 sdd2[3] sdc2[0] sdb2[1] sda2[2] 1171837056 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU] md0 : active raid1 sdd1[3] sdc1[0] sdb1[1] sda1[2] 96256 blocks [4/4] [UUUU]
software Raid5 Storage
I finally got myself a decent file server setup. 4 disks using software raid5. I took an old (but still pretty powerful) machine I had lying around and added 4 new disks (samsung 400GB) and a sata controller (Promise TX4). Of course I went for a Gentoo installation, as I know that distribution the best, and more importantly, I like it. There is more then enough usable documentation on the software raid part. Now I’m not really a sysadmin so this took me about 2 days to set up.
I partitioned the disk in 2 parts:
Raid 1 100MB for /boot
Raid 5 for the rest /
First I tried with LVM2 but that seemed to fail miserably at boot time, so I dropped that part and just made it a normal ext3 partition. The array seems to be working fine now (no errors as of yet) and it does not require any noticeable cpu power. I am amazed. In my humble opinion there seems to be no need at all to use a hardware controller if you’re just using Linux, besides the fact that a hardware solution provides multi-booting and easy setup. Linux software raid is far more flexible then hardware as it seems to accept any block device (maybe even an iPod?).
Today I disconnected one drive, to see if it still worked. The complete system booted perfectly without the fourth drive. After the reboot with the fourth drive reconnected again, it needed some rebuilding. A long rebuild of almost 6 hours.