Proper Grill Cloth for my Guitar Cabinet

Posted on by hukl

Today I felt like improving my guitar speaker cabinet which I’ve built a while ago. I was never happy with the round metal grill I have put in front of the speaker.

old

Instead I wanted a grill cloth in front of the speaker but by the time I built the cabinet I didn’t think much about it.

Today I went out and bought some wood to make a simple frame for the grill cloth.

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Then I put the grill cloth on which is quite challenging but there are guide on the internet that show you how to do it. Basically you start at one side and attach it with a big stapler/tacker – you now the ones which shoot the needle/clamp into the wood. Then you pull it over the opposite side with as much tension as possible and attach it. Same for the remaining two sides.

The result:

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Fun little project for the afternoon.

If you want to know how I built the cab – follow this link: »How to Build a Guitar Speaker Cabinet«

New FreeBSD Screencast Episode about CARP

Posted on by hukl

Today I’ve tried out CARP, the Common Address Redundancy Protocol, which allows you to easily set up automatic failover for machines which usually become single points of failure in your infrastructure like loadbalancers, firewalls and routers.

It was so easy and quick that I made a short video demonstrating it:

Commands

# Machine 1
ifconfig carp0 create
ifconfig carp0 vhid 1 advskew 100 pass foobartralala 10.8.0.130/24


# Machine 2
ifconfig carp0 create
ifconfig carp0 vhid 1 advskew 200 pass foobartralala 10.8.0.130/24

If you want to make that set up permanent put something similar to your /etc/rc.conf:

cloned_interfaces="carp0"
ifconfig_carp0="vhid 1 advskew 100 pass foobartralala 10.8.0.130/24"

Erlang R16 64Bit on OS X 10.9 with wxWidgets

Posted on by hukl

A lot of people have tried to get Erlang running on OSX with 64Bit and wxWidgets and there are plenty of guides out there but most of them claim that it doesn’t work with 64Bit.

I just successfully compiled it as 64Bit on 10.9.2 and here is how I did it:

1. I installed wxWidgets and Erlang from homebrew and deinstalled them again, just to get all the dependencies conveniently
2. Then I fetched the sources for wxWidgets 3.0 from sourceforge and the sources for Erlang R16 from the erlang website
3. I configured them with a blend of options from the official docs and the other guides

Configure and Compile wxWidgets

./configure --with-cocoa --prefix=/usr/local \
            --with-macosx-version-min=10.9 --disable-shared

make
make install

Configure and Compile Erlang

./configure --disable-debug --without-javac --enable-shared-zlib \
            --enable-dynamic-ssl-lib --enable-hipe \
            --enable-smp-support --enable-threads \
            --enable-kernel-poll --with-wx --enable-darwin-64bit

make
make install

Thats was it. I hope that helps.

Getting Started with FreeBSD

Posted on by hukl

I’m a huge FreeBSD fan. My very first home router ran FreeBSD back in the late 90’s and since then I have installed it on every single server I worked with. I do realize that this is some kind of niche since almost everybody else is running Linux these days. This is why I thought to make FreeBSD a little bit more approachable to the curious people.

Why? Because FreeBSD offers a lot of cool features like ZFS, Jails, reliability, stable API and a great network stack which makes it a really superb server operating system. In fact I just realized I never had to clean install any of the many FreeBSD machines I have operated. They just kept running flawlessly unless some hardware died of course.

To get you started I have recorded a little screencast to show how easy and painless it is to install FreeBSD 10.0 with a ZFS root filesystem on a remote machine even if the hosting provider does not provide FreeBSD rescue images.

In the next videos I’ll show you how to install software, set up a web server and other common, server related tasks.

For that I have created a FreeBSD Guides channel on vimeo.

Additional Links:
* http://www.freebsd.org
* http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/hardware.html
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD

FreeBSD: Authentication Error when fetching ports from github

Posted on by hukl

For people who have the same problem:

I have tried to install a port that fetches its source from github and it failed to fetch it.

When I tried the fetch command manually for the given URL I saw the following error:

fetch https://github.com/nicolargo/glances/archive/v1.7.3.tar.gz
Certificate verification failed for /C=US/O=DigiCert Inc/OU=www.digicert.com/CN=DigiCert High Assurance EV CA-1
34380826280:error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed:/usr/src/secure/lib/libssl/../../../crypto/openssl/ssl/s3_clnt.c:1168:
fetch: https://github.com/nicolargo/glances/archive/v1.7.3.tar.gz: Authentication error

I assume its related to githubs latest improvement to their HTTPS/SSL infrastructure.

To solve this I installed the very latest version of OpenSSL on my FreeBSD 10 machine and afterwards the installation just went fine.