So wouldn’t you know it, my video card died and I decided to get around to installing Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 at the same time.  Of course, installing Windows 7 took over the booter, then installing Ubuntu 9.10 took over the booter and did a great job at identifying Windows 7 and OS X.  In fact, it did too good identifying OS X.

The new version of grub2 is able to work directly with OS X to start it up natively.  Unfortunately,  I like to try to not patch OS X as much as possibly, so I use Chameleon, which grub2 was bypassing.  I don’t know what a beautiful solution is, but I do know what a working solution is.

OS with Loaders:

• Windows 7 (Default Boot Loader)
• Ubuntu 9.10 (Grub2)
• OS X 10.5.6 (Chameleon 2.0-RC4)

The first step is to install OS X however you usually do it.  Once it is installed, I chose to upgrade to the latest version of Chameleon for some of the additional video card identification that it was able to provide.  All that requires is downloading from the link above and following the directions.  Before you reboot, copy the boot0 file to removable media.

The next step is to install Windows 7.  Once this is done, Windows has now taken over the boot system and you can no longer start OS X.

Finally, it is time to install Ubuntu 9.10.   Once the install has finished, it has taken over the boot screen and you will see entries for Ubuntu, Windows, and OS X.  The only issue is, if you try to start OS X, it will bypass Chameleon and start the kernel directly.

To fix this issue, make the directory /boot/chameleon and then copy the boot0 from the removable media into that directory.  Then add or update the OS X section to the following:

menuentry “Mac OS X Chameleon (on /dev/sda2)” {
insmod hfsplus
set root=(hd0,2)
search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set 88e76bb6d81f12fb
parttool (hd0,2) boot+
chainloader (hd0,4)/boot/chameleon/boot0
}

The “88e76bb6d81f12fb” is the uuid of the partition. You can find the uuid by:

# user@teh-lunix:~$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

I currently picked up a $21 Dell Truemobile 1490 wireless card to put in my MSI Wind instead of the Realtek that’s in it. It install just fine, I got it working in Windows and Linux with no issues, but OS X was another story.

It wouldn’t connect to a wireless network at all by itself. On the menu bar it wouldn’t show any wireless networks. It did show “AirPort: Not configured”. If I opened the network preferences, it would show up as Ethernet 2 off. I would have to turn it back on each time I rebooted. I would then have to select the drop down box to pick a network because it still wouldn’t show any networks in the menu bar (and the menu bar would still say not configured). I could join my network and get an IP address, but the menu bar icon would not show any bars at all. It would be right next to the access point and I could surf the net just fine though.

Thanks to a post at InsanelyMac, I was able to finally fix this issue.

1. Open Network Preferences
2. Remove all devices except Firewire by highlighting the device and then clicking on the minus sign below the device list
3. Reboot the machine
4. Open Network Preferences
5. Click the plus sign under the device list and select AirPort
6. Click Apply

Since doing that, my menu bar works, networks are connected to automatically, even after reboots.

So I just purchased an MSI Wind from Microcenter and have already removed all the OS’ from it. I’m planning on installing Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu Linux. Like most of my laptops, things are just plug and play to get it working, so I have a page to help me remember how I did it at: http://james.jamesandkristin.net/setting-up-msi-wind-to-triple-boot-windows-mac-os-x-linux

So far it looks like it’s perfect for what we need. A nice little laptop that will fit in Kristin’s purse and that will fit in little safes on vacation. Luckily my friend had a usb to ide adapter, so I didn’t have to purchase an external hard drive. I had looked into making a usb boot disks for all three os’s and even looked at using netboot to install. Netboot would have been cool, but I don’t have that much time to get it setup for all three OS’s.

One important note, you need to install Windows XP before anything else.

Well, I’ve managed to upgrade wordpress and gallery again. It’s been a while, so the versions were pretty far behind. One nice benefit of this upgrade is that the photo gallery is now working again. Enjoy.

I had the problem of taking an external syslog feed (through UDP or TCP) that came from multiple devices and then separating them into folders that identified the feeds by customers / device type / host. The one thing I had on my side was that the hostname of the devices were broken up into three parts to help me get this information.

In the old Syslog-ng (1.6.x), there was not a way to regex out this information and then use it in the destination section. Each time we had a new combination, it required writing additional lines with additional regexs. Started to really feel it on performance. With the new branch of syslog-ng (2.0.x), this feature is now available.

You can use up to 256 different $NNN ($1 … $256) macros, but you can only use one regexp expression. This will be done using a filter.

Here’s a full example of what I had done then. What I wanted to do is put the line in a specific file based on part of the hostname. For example:

Hostname: subdomain.domain.tld
Save the log files for that device at:
/logs/$TLD/$DOMAIN/$SUBDOMAIN/$R_YEAR-$R_MONTH-$R_DAY.log

WHERE $TLD is the tld of the hostname, $DOMAIN is the domain from the hostname, and $SUBDOMAIN is the subdomain from the hostname.

I would like to be able to regex this information out of the hostname to use in the destination.

To accomplish this, I was able to use this configuration:

filter f_filter { host(“^([0-9a-zA-Z\-]+)\.([0-9a-zA-Z\-]+)\.([0-9a-zA-Z\-]+)$”); };
destination f_logs { file(“/logs/$3/$2/$1/$YEAR-$MONTH-$DAY.log”); };
log {
     source(external);
     filter(f_filter);
     destination(f_logs);
     flags(final);
};