Which is why I’m not going to tell you how to setup VNC to manage your computer or server remotely with a graphical environment.  I’m going to show you how to setup true remote desktop a la Windows, that is secure, allows for multiple concurrent sessions, and uses the standard remote desktop client found on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

What makes all this possible is an incredible program called Xrdp.  You can find it here. It’s a daemon that runs on the remote machine, and allows you to connect to it using, you guessed it, remote desktop.  Installation is a breeze, you simply unzip the file like so:

tar -xvzf xrdp-0.4.0.tar.gz

This will create a folder called “xrdp-0.4.0″.  To install it, simply cd into the directory and run the following commands:

make

make install

That’s it!  To start the daemon the commands are:

/usr/share/xrdp/sesman

/usr/share/xrdp/xrdp

The daemon will now run quietly in the background and answer RDP requests.  I have not written an init script to start the daemon automatically on bootup, so you may have to shell in and restart the program if your computer reboots.

This program is extremely useful, especially if you have a server that needs to be managed by people who are not used to a command line environment, or if you are a home user with Linux on your desktops that you want to manage graphically.  This can make it easier if you are transitioning from a graphically managed system like windows, to a Linux-based system.

The downside is that there is a significant initial investment to get the system up and running, and once invested you are limited to using Microsoft’s proprietary client applications if you want to enjoy the full benefits and capabilities of the system. Naturally this means that any growth in staff means investing more money in additional software licenses on top of any expenditures for new hardware. These costs can and do add up quickly.

What if there were a way to create an internal information infrastructure (say that three times fast) that was cheap to deploy, and even cheaper to scale up? Well there is!

First of all, let’s examine the costs of a typical Exchange Server deployment on a network of 10-20 users, and on a network of 100+ users.

One thing any Exchange administrator knows is that it can at times be a resource hog, so skimping on the hardware is not an option unless you don’t mind frequent delays and outages. At the time of this writing, a typical server platform that will perform reasonably well with up to 50 users is no less than $1,000. A license for Windows Server 2008 is $1,000, and a license for Exchange Server Standard edition is $700. Assuming you have your own in-house IT person to deploy the system, you’ve just dropped $2,700 on a system no one can even use yet! Before anyone on your network can connect to the Exchange system, you need to hand out another $200-$400 per user for a Microsoft Office licenses. For a company of 20 people, this is between $4,000 and $8,000. So all told for an office of just 20 people, you’ve spent $6,700 to $10,700, not including labor costs if you have to contract out to someone to install and deploy the system.

If your network is even larger, with 100 users or more, your costs increase dramatically. You’ll be looking at closer to $2,000 or more for the server itself, Server 2008 Enterprise is $4,000, and Exchange Server Enterprise is $4,000, plus the unavoidable client licensing at $400 per employee. A larger business might be able to absorb these costs more easily, but $10,000 plus deployment and client costs is still a large amount of money to spend.

But what other option is there? Nothing else approaches the ease and power of Exchange, does it?

Enter the Open Source. Windows Buffs and maybe even some Linux gurus are scoffing right now, and rightfully so. For a long time Microsoft has reigned supreme in the world of corporate information infrastructure. In all fairness Exchange is a great product with proven user and administrator-friendliness. Perhaps its greatest downfall is the sticker shock, and there are questions about its stability and security in some scenarios.

But indulge me for a moment in a mental sidebar and you’ll see that there are alternatives and good reasons to give them serious thought. One of the most popular articles on my blog here at OSS is the article on how to get Mozilla Thunderbird to integrate with Exchange. It gets more hits than anything else I’ve written, and “Thunderbird Exchange” is the most popular search term for my humble site. The catch, however, is that most folks aren’t looking for ways to get their email from Exchange with Thunderbird. That isn’t an exceedingly difficult task for someone with a moderate amount of tech savvy. What people are looking for is a way to get the full functionality of Outlook with its calendering, tasking, and address book features, out of the humble contender from the Mozilla project.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, that just isn’t possible. Thunderbird can not integrate with the Exchange calendar, and sometimes doing so can result in undesired consequences for both the user and the server itself. Thunderbird can access the Active Directory catalog with some work (see this article for more on how to do this), and something similar to the “push” effect can be achieved by using IMAP, but this just isn’t the same.

So why not take Exchange out of the equation altogether? Let’s see how much we save in money alone by moving to an open source collaboration server. The only deployment cost is what you decide to spend on the server itself. You can go totally open, and can do just fine with a $1,000 server if you are a large organization. If you only have 50 users or less, you can even use a second-hand server with something like a Pentium 4 with a couple gigs of RAM and spend $500 or less. You can also use a Windows-based server running open source services, but despite what you may think this is not an easier to manage setup. If you go this route, expect to spend a bit more for a Windows server license and more powerful hardware. If you want to use something very competitive to Sharepoint as an internal or external company website, take a look at O3 Spaces which works with Microsoft Office or Open Office and provides some excellent tools for collaboration and presentation. There is a free Community Edition, or you can opt for a paid subscription which gets you support and updates for 59 Euros per year per user. All of the other software you need to implement a completely open system works along the same method. You can get all of the parts for free (except the hardware, unless you’re a scrounger like myself), but you are certainly welcome to pay for a license in most cases which will usually get you professional support and access to updates sooner.

Wow, what a difficult choice! $7,000+ minimum, plus hundreds more every time your business grows, or $2,000 or less in most cases for the same, if not better, functionality, and no further investment needed, no matter how much you grow. You be the judge.

I’m sure now that you’re all wondering about the details of how this is done. So over the course of my next few articles I’m going to show you what pieces you will need, how they work, and how to put them all together to make a robust, secure, and extremely productive backbone for your company. You’ll find that it’s not nearly as difficult as you think, and the benefits are well worth the effort. But just as a teaser, here are the things we’re going to use server-side:

• Fedora Core Linux: This will be the underlying operating system we’ll use. It is secure, stable, and battle-tested for stability.
• Fedora Directory Services: This is a group of tools that are similar to Microsoft’s Active Directory, and will provide organization, information, and security to the other services running on our network.
• Cyrus IMAP: An email server that provides functionality that is identical to Microsoft Exchange in most if not all respects, and has some great security features.
• O3 Spaces: A web-based intranet system similar to Microsoft Sharepoint that allows users to share information and files and collaborate on projects.
• Apache with WebDAV: This will provide a shared calendar and task server that can be integrated with Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Mozilla Sunbird.

On the client side we’ll be using Open Office, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Sunbird. The server will work for any client operating system, including Windows. However, Linux and even Mac clients will see slightly more benefits as the possibility for implementing centralized authentication and information exchange becomes available. We will be testing with clients running OpenSuSE and Windows XP. Until next time, happy exploring!

The SCLUA site is still a work in progress, but a wiki style has been chosen so the site will never be formally “complete”.  There is already a lot of information and links to other useful sites there (including this one!).  We have also agreed to let SCLUA use our Listserv to provide email-based discussion lists free of charge to local user groups who need one.   SCLUA also provides webspace on their wiki to user groups who may or may not already have a website of their own.

I’m excited to see where SCLUA goes in the future.  I think it’s a great idea that has a potential to provide a number of benefits to Linux users and regular computer users alike in South Carolina, and other groups may be inspired to pop up as a result of seeing this model.

Visit the SCLUA’s website here.

Something I spend a significant amount of time dealing with in my line of work is website statistics. Eventually every website owner wants to know who is visiting their site and how often. It’s a gauge to some extent of how popular your site is, and therefore a measure of your ability to create something people will be attracted to, and in some cases buy from. The problem is that web statistics are a tricky beast. No two stats packages are going to give the same results, and no matter how perfect the setup, you are never going to get a completely accurate picture of your website traffic. At best, you’re going to get an educated guestimate of how many people have viewed your site.

There are dozens of different statistics applications out in the wild. By far the most common and most popular is AWStats. Of all the different choices, I would say AWStats provides the most complete and accurate picture you could get short of reading the raw logs yourself. But several problems can crop up if things aren’t just so with your server. I’ve especially seen problems on Windows servers where permissions don’t seem to work the way you expect them to. Perhaps this is part of my own lack of knowledge, but regardless one problem in particular has vexated me for years.

If, for one reason or another, AWStats goes for several days or months without updating correctly, you cannot just run an update and expect all your stats to magically appear. AWStats will parse the most recent log file and leave everything else blank. Up to now, the solution has been to go back and manually reparse each log file one at a time, in sequential order, from the very beginning of your logs (not just the beginning of the gap). You’ll also have this problem if you are installing AWStats on a site that has already been active for a while. Obviously this process can take hours. I’ve spent as much as two days reparsing the logs for one domain. Frankly, I don’t have time for this. So this morning when I was faced with the prospect of having to read in two years worth of logs for 25 domains all at once, I resolved to find an automated solution, and here is what I came up with:

<?php  //AWStats Rebuild Script © Josh Benson 2008

//On a Posix system, change these variables to point to the folder where the log folders

// for each site are kept, and the folder where awstats.pl is located
$logfolder = “/var/www/logs/”;
$awstats_bin = “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl”;

//Get listing of folders (sites) that we need to update
$listing = array();
$command = “ls $logfolders”;
exec($command, $listing, $status);

//Go through each folder and update from each log file
foreach ($listing as $folder){
        echo “Updating $folder…\n”;
        $logfiles = array();
        $sitename = “www.”.$folder;
        $command = “ls -tr “.$logfolders.$folder;
        exec($command, $logfiles, $status);

        foreach($logfiles as $logfile){
            //Parse the logfile
            echo “\tReading $logfile…\n”;
            $fullpath = $logfolders.$folder.’/’.$logfile;
            $command = “$awstats_bin –update –config=$sitename –LogFile=\”$fullpath\”";
            echo $command . “\n”;
            exec($command, $result, $status);
            if ($status != 0){
                echo “Log Parse Failed!\n”;
                $failed = TRUE;
                echo $status . “\n”;
            }
            else {
                echo “\tLog $logfile read ok…\n”;
            }
        }

	if ($failed == TRUE){
			echo “$sitename was not updated correctly!\n”;
		}
		else {
			echo “$sitename updated successfully!\n”;
		}
 }

?>

This script assumes a couple things about your setup. It assumes that instead of having a log folder under the directory for each domain, that you have one log folder with subfolders for each domain on your server. This isn’t the standard setup for a lot of people, but it’s easy enough to change it and it’s a more efficient configuration in the long run. It also (obviously) assumes you’re running some flavor of Linux or BSD. In my case it was Fedora Core 4 with the RPM distribution of AWStats installed, but the script should be flexible enough to accommodate just about any distribution and configuration.

To run this script, simply open your favorite text editor and paste the code in, and save it as awupdate.php or something like that on your server. Since it uses full paths it can be run from anywhere on the server by issuing “php awupdate.php” from the command line. I would not recommend running this from a web browser, since it generates a lot of text output to show you the status of the update. There is no reason you could not use this script on just one domain, or just one domain at a time if you don’t mind editing it to reflect the correct directories.

Inevitably I’ll be posting a Windows version of this script, since I have to perform this type of update on Windows servers far more often than on Linux. The challenge on Windows is dealing with the different way the exec() function in PHP and the DIR command work. I’m not yet sure if DIR has command line options like the “ls” command on Unix to sort the results in a temporal way. After I do some more research, I’ll have an update about this in a few days. In the meantime, all you Linux/Apache admins can thank me by taking a few minutes out of the hours you’ll now have freed up to donate to my beer fund.

Some of you may already be familiar with commercial cloning programs like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. These programs are okay, but they lack a few features I think are essential to quickly and safely duplicating a drive. For starters, it’s usually an educated guessing game with either of these programs as to which drive should be the source and which should be the destination. Guess wrong, and you end up sending all of your data into the ether forever. If you’re motivated enough, you can yank both drives and track down their device IDs, but even then you don’t always have the ability to view the device IDs in the previously mentioned applications. If you happen to be cloning one drive to another one of identical size and manufacturer, which does happen in cases of system migration or failure recovery, you are taking a shot in the dark as to which drive is which.

Enter dd, a very small, unassuming application which comes as part of the core utilities on any Unix or Linux system. Dd’s primary role in life is copy files bit for bit from one place to another, which sounds useless until you recall that Linux can treat a partition or even a whole storage device (like a hard drive for instance?) as a pseudo-file. This means we can take an input file (the original hard drive), and copy it bit for bit to the output file (the new hard drive). Since this is a command line tool, we have all the other command line tools at our disposal to verify that the devices we’re working with are the correct ones.

To start with, let me point out that you do not want to clone a drive this way while booted from the source drive. This will cause an unending list of failures and eventually destroy the source drive. We need to boot into a virtual environment, like the kind provided by a LiveCD, and leave both drives unmounted during the cloning process. Since this is the case however, it means we can clone a drive no matter what operating system is installed on it. Dd copies bit for bit, and doesn’t care about the actual structure or format of the data it’s copying, so you can boot into a liveCD like SystemRescueCD and clone Windows, MacOS, or Linux drives all the same way without any problem.

For those of you who aren’t already Linux gurus, here is a bit of background on how Linux treats devices, particularly hard drives. There is a folder on most Linux systems called “/dev” which holds a number of files. There are entries here for everything from the text terminal you read and type with, modems, network cards, sound cards, video cards, hard drive controllers, CD or DVD drives, and of course, hard drives. The naming conventions on different systems may differ, but generally the first IDE drive will be called /dev/hda, the second will be called /dev/hdb, and so on. Be careful, because an IDE CDROM drive is treated the same way, so if you have a hard drive and a CDROM drive, you will probably have active devices for both /dev/hda and /dev/hdb, but you’ll need to determine which one is the hard drive, which we’ll discuss in a moment. If you have SATA or SCSI hard drives or CD drives, they will be named something like /dev/sda or /dev/sdb and so on. This makes it extremely easy to clone from an IDE drive to a SATA or SCSI drive and vice versa.

Let’s say however, for the sake of argument, that you are cloning between two drives which are identical in technology and size; two 100GB SATA drives for instance. How do we tell which is which before we start copying? Simple, we’ve got all the power of the Linux command line at our disposal. So first off we’ll use ’stat’ to see which devices are actually active:

stat /dev/sda

If there is in fact a device there, you should see something similar to the following:

File: `/dev/sda’
Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 block special file
Device: fh/15d Inode: 3980 Links: 1 Device type: 8,0
Access: (0640/brw-r—–) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 6/ disk)
Access: 2008-01-21 08:59:42.269741059 -0500
Modify: 2008-01-21 08:59:21.304389417 -0500
Change: 2008-01-21 08:59:25.304617435 -0500

If there is nothing at /dev/sda, you’ll see something like this:

stat: cannot stat `/dev/sda’: No such file or directory

Now if you have two SATA or SCSI drives attached, you should be able to stat both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb successfully. Be careful though, because if you have a SATA or SCSI CDROM drive, it will show a successful stat also. However, we can tell which drive is which by mounting them and checking the contents.

mkdir /mnt/test

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/test

cd /mnt/test

ls

This series of commands creates a directory called /mnt/test, “mounts” or attaches the device /dev/sda1 (the 1 signifies the first partition on device sda) to the /mnt/test directory, changes to that directory and attempts to list any files found there. If it doesn’t find any files, the ls command simply won’t list anything. If it does find files, check them to see if they are from the source hard drive, or a CD-ROM. If they are from the source drive, we’re good to go. Unmount the drive to prepare it for cloning.

umount /dev/sda

If ls didn’t find any files, chances are this is the blank drive you want to clone to. Go through the procedure with /dev/sdb and so on until you find the files from your source drive, then make sure all the drives are unmounted before proceeding to the next step.

*WARNING! YOU CAN DESTROY ALL OF YOUR DATA IF THE NEXT STEP IS NOT DONE CAREFULLY! DO NOT SUE OR EMAIL ME IF YOU WIPE YOUR DRIVE BY DOING THE NEXT FEW STEPS INCORRECTLY. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!*

Once you have determined the device names of the source and destination drive, it’s time to do the actual cloning. Dd takes a number of arguments which you can read about in the Unix manual page, but normally the only two you’ll need are if (input file) and of (output file). In our case the input “file” is the device /dev/sda, and the output “file” is the device /dev/sdb. In this case, the command to clone /dev/sda to /dev/sdb is:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

You will get no indication of what is going on for a while. How long this takes depends on the size of the source drive, the speed of the drives, and the speed of your computer. Even on very fast machines however, cloning an 80 to 100GB hard drive will generally take an hour or two, so go grab some lunch and read the rest of the great articles here on OSS. Once the process has finished, you’ll get a response similar to this:

80GB copied

You’re all set! Remove the original drive and boot into the new drive to test things out. If you have any problems, post them here so that other users can avoid them beforehand and see the solutions.

DD provides a free and effective alternative to commercial programs that cost a lot but don’t deliver much. With the full power of the Linux command line at your disposal, you have far more options for performing a safer, more reliable copy. Happy cloning!

Yesterday I finally stumbled across a program that fit the bill. More than just a program with a static set of features, PJSIP contains a complete library of functions so that you can build your own programs based on the SIP protocol in practically any language you like. However, it does come with several example applications you can build and use on multiple platforms. The primary application is called pjsua, and contains a fully-featured, menu-based interface for the command line. This program alone did everything we needed and more.

Pjsua is incredibly easy to use. Run without any options, it presents you with a nice menu-interface where you can add accounts, add and view the status of other SIP users, make calls, transfer calls, put calls on hold, conference calls, and even pipe in audio from wav files. If you’re in a hurry, you can make a call with the following short and simple command:

pjsua sip:<user>@<domain>

Or if you know the IP address of the other user, you can do the following:

pjsua sip:<ip address>

Chances are you’ll want to have a registered account on a server running something like Asterisk. You can use command-line options to specify the account details every time, or you can put the command-line options into a config file and have pjsua load that instead using the following syntax:

pjsua –config-file=<config file>

One of the neatest features of pjsua is the ability to run it in “daemon” mode, officially called auto-answer. In this mode, pjsua sits idling, waiting for an incoming call. When it detects an incoming call, pjsua answers and can do several different things. Here is an example command:

pjsua –null-audio –play-file=data3.wav –auto-play –rec-file=call001.wav –auto-rec –auto-answer=200 –config-file=pj-config

Broken down, this command tells pjsua to run, register itself with the central server with the details provided in “pj-config”, to listen for incoming calls and automatically answer with code 200 (for those of you familiar with HTTP status codes, SIP status codes are remarkably similar), to loop data3.wav after answering the call, and to record any audio on the line (except the wav file being piped in).

Why on earth would this be useful? Say, for instance, I have a business client using my VoIP service at the other end of the state. He calls me to complain that call quality has been atrocious for the past few days. There are a few things I can do. I can take up a bunch of his time having him troubleshoot with me on the phone, I can drive all the way across the state and troubleshoot the issue myself, or I can use the web server we’ve also installed on his network to make my own test calls without ever leaving my office or tying up the client’s time or phone line. I can simply place a call to the test number and listen to the looped recording for evidence of audio quality issues. This only tells me half the story however, as often times with VoIP sessions only one side of the conversation is affected. This is where the recording comes in, as I can now download it from the remote server and analyze it for problems. This saves both time and money, and provides an easy yet effective way to track down problems.

Pjsua is a fully featured SIP client, so if you have speakers and a microphone on your system, you can use this just like you would any other soft-phone. However, given that there are several other soft-phones for linux with a nice GUI interface, one of them may be a better choice if your goal is simply to make and receive calls from your computer. But if you need something to run in a windowless environment, or you’re like me and need something lightweight to help troubleshoot VoIP issues, you can download Pjsua and the entire PJSIP library from http://www.pjsip.org.

Doing this has made it possible for them to pursue a passion, while making it easier for new bands to get themselves heard. They have also pioneered an on-demand production model which keeps their costs extremely low while still producing as many CDs as the bands want or need. This mean less waste, more profit for the bands, and low overhead for the recording company. Fall of the West is a not-for-profit company, but this model could be applied with little modification for a group who did want to do this for a living. In short, anyone who owns or wants to own a small business can learn some incredibly useful things from what Fall of the West has done.

OSS: Tell us a little bit about your record label.
Jay Cassano: It’s called “Fall of the West”. It’s a workers’ collective where decisions are made on consensus, we don’t make money off of it, it’s all small folk/punk/experimental bands, and it’s run by a bunch of anarchists. We also try to be really involved in local politics and local organizations.
OSS: What prompted you to start this project?
Jay Cassano: Well, I wasn’t one of the founders of the label, but when I met Brian last year it was just natural for me to join on. I hate how for-profit companies monopolize knowledge and make us think we need them. That’s what the record label is really about, proving to ourselves and the world that we don’t need a Sony or Warner Bros to produce and package professional-looking music products. I also think the future of record labels is very much in jeopardy. People are realizing that CDs are somewhat a pointless medium. If you want a digital version, just download it. If you want a physical copy, get a vinyl record.

OSS: Vinyl is making a comeback?
Jay Cassano: We (the bands and the company) seem to sell our vinyl records so much more quickly than our CDs. But that might have more to do with punk culture than a general trend. At the very least, we have to acknowledge that file sharing is going to continue to severely impact the music industry .

OSS: Aren’t turntables expensive and hard to come by?
Jay Cassano: Eh, that’s kind of true. But you can find a functional one on eBay for $50 pretty easily. When you think about it, buying CDs is kind of pointless. They don’t do much that a digital file doesn’t, especially with all the mp3 players (ipods etc.) out there. You can just as easily burn a CD of the music you download online. It’s obviously kind of silly for me to sit here and try to predict the future. But that’s definitely something I see as a possibility. You want music on your computer, you get a file. You want a physical copy of the music, you get a record. There are definitely other factors to consider. That’s just a trend that we’ve been observing first-hand. Since we want to acknowledge this trend, whenever we sell a record to someone, we email them a .zip file of the music so they can listen to it on their computer or on the vinyl.

OSS: Do you have a brick and mortar store?
Jay Cassano: No, we don’t. We don’t know that we ever really will. Sometimes Brian and I half-joke about opening up some other worker collective, like a restaurant/cafe and running the label from a back room there and selling stuff in the store front. As far as we can see into the future right now though, we won’t have a need for an actual storefront. Especially since we’re not doing this to make a living. That being said, we do have our stuff stocked on retail in some small independent local stores. Maybe if we get big enough, we’ll get an actual store. but there are also a whole host of concerns about “getting bigger” and we’re just not sure if we want that. Fall of the West is small label that functions well for small bands or for bands that need a stepping stone.

OSS: So no big plans to go Hollywood?
Jay Cassano: We’re definitely comfortable with where we are right now. To some extent, getting bigger would contradict our whole purpose. I really love the area we’re in and I love what we’re doing. And like I said, we’re already involved with a few local organizations that are doing some really amazing work, so I’d like to stick in the area. The two organizations we’re most involved with are The Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives and North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens.

OSS: What sort of things do you collaborate on?
Jay Cassano: We’re pseudo-members of the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives (VAWC). Because we’re not making money off of this, we’re not technically a “worker cooperative” according to the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, which VAWC is a part of. We share the Alliance’s aims and we go to all the meetings and are active participants in them. As college students, we’re also involved with trying to get some of our peers to do research for VAWC. For example, VAWC is going to start an informational campaign soon to educate people in the area about the benefits of worker cooperatives over traditional capitalist businesses. That campaign was actually Brian’s suggestion at the last meeting. So, for all intents and purposes, we’re members of VAWC and function that way. If the label ever does get bigger and we end up doing this for a living, we would definitely become full-fledged members of VAWC.
At North Star, Brian actually just finished teaching a class called “running a do-it-yourself record label” to a group of high school aged kids. Brian showed them our equipment, explained how we do everything and really demonstrated that it’s the kind of thing that anyone can do, much like how I think the open source movement views software. He showed them everything from how to record their own music to how to produce and package CDs. The kids loved it.

OSS: What gives you guys an edge over other record labels?
Jay Cassano: One thing that distinguishes us from most other labels (even other independent or DIY labels) is that some money from all of our sales online goes directly to the bands.

OSS: Really? i thought most labels worked that way
Jay Cassano: Some DIY labels will produce a set amount of CDs, give like 15% of that to the bands for free, and then sell the rest. When they sell the remaining on their site, they keep the money. It works because bands get some of the CDs for free. It’s definitely better and simpler than a major record label, but it’s not perfect. (Not to say that our way is flawless either.) What we do is try to be more flexible about it. Instead of producing a set and finite amount, we try to take advantage of the fact that we are a small, DIY label. We don’t need to produce 1000 CDs; we can produce 238 CDs if we want, or we can produce 15. It doesn’t make a difference because we do everything ourselves. If a small label outsources its production to a professional CD-pressing plant, then they have to make a large quantity, usually 500 sometimes 1000. The difference is that those are dependent on the manufacturers of the CDs; we have the ability to make only what’s needed when it’s needed.
We also don’t give bands free CDs, like a lot of labels, unless that’s what they want, in which case we’ll work it out. But our preferred way of doing things is to sell the CDs we make to the bands at the cost required to produce them. Then they sell them at their shows so they can pay off the amount they owe us really easily and still make some profit. And we don’t have them pay us until they’ve sold those CDs, that way they’re never in debt to us. That would be wrong and contradictory to what we’re trying to do. A lot of DIY labels (ones who make the CDs themselves or who use CD manufacturers), like was stated earlier, give the band 15% or so of the CDs - and then if the band ever wants anymore they have to buy them for wholesale cost from the label. And then they can only get however many the label has; once the CD is out of print they can’t get anymore unless the label makes the investment to produce more. The way we do it, bands don’t get the 15% for free, but they get them for almost the exact cost it took to produce them - and they can get any amount of the CDs whenever, because they are never out of print. Yet, it’s not like this is the “best” way of doing it. We’re an all volunteer run label; we’re not making a living off of this. Some labels are actually trying to support themselves with their work in the DIY world, and that’s totally cool, so whatever way they are working probably makes the most sense for them. We don’t need to make a profit, just what we put into it back, so that’s why we’re able to operate in this way. Though, the way we do it does require a significant amount of initial investment for the materials and the equipment, so some labels might just rather pay-as-they-go and that might be the best method for them.
That’s how it works when bands sell their CDs. The flip side of that is how it works when we sell albums off our website. The only money we take from those sales is the money we put into it so that we can continue to exist and fund our next project to put out more music. Then $1 from every sale goes to a non-profit organization of the band’s choice as a way of giving back to the community. After that, all the remaining money goes to the band. So it’s not that the bands get “a cut” - they actually get most of the money. It seems kind of complicated I guess, but it seems to have gone over really well with the bands. Sometimes it doesn’t work perfectly though, so we’re always trying to adapt and evolve and make it better for the people and for the bands. We make it easy for small local bands who don’t have a lot of money but really want to get their music out there, and I think that dollar to a non-profit from every sale is a pretty important thing we do.

OSS: So what’s the point of all this?
Jay Cassano: We’re about getting good, non-mainstream music out there and building real sustainable communities. We think art is integral to any vision of social change.

OSS: Where can people find you?
Jay Cassano: Our website is www.fallofthewest.com and you can hear free tracks at http://www.fallofthewest.com/media.htm

OSS: What sparked the idea for the Wikimedia project?
Erik: As a child, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spent many hours poring over
the World Book Encyclopedia. Inspired by the free software & open
source movement, which has resulted in amazing innovations such as the
GNU/Linux operating system, Jimmy launched a first effort to create a
free encyclopedia in March 2000. The Nupedia project, in its first
announcement, was already “planned to become the largest general
encyclopedia in the history of humankind”. But Nupedia was a failure -
an interesting study in the need for openness in collaborative
endeavor. Only 24 articles completed its heavy peer review process,
and the project was quietly dismantled in 2003.

In January 2001, more as an experiment, Wales installed a wiki to see
if it could be used to draft articles, perhaps to be later finalized
for publication. This wiki became its own dedicated site, Wikipedia,
and exploded in growth. Wikis had been around since 1995, invented by
software engineer Ward Cunningham. The first wiki software Wikipedia
used was a tiny open source Perl script (leading credence to the
belief that all good things start as tiny Perl scripts). Since then,
volunteers from all over the world have created the MediaWiki
software, arguably the most widely used & most successful open source
wiki engine.

OSS: Did you expect it to become the phenomenon that is has?
Erik: Me personally? Certainly not. When I first came across Wikipedia (I
had not paid much attention to Nupedia), it seemed wacky and
disorganized. Heck, it _was_ wacky and disorganized. It was also
ridiculously addictive & extremely interesting. It took me a few
months to realize that this thing might become really, really huge &
important.

OSS: Do you think this open model has benefits over commercial information and media sources?
Erik: It’s certainly a useful complement. Wikipedia has its own difficulties
dealing with controversial & hotly debated topics, because they can
turn into battlegrounds for different factions waging “edit wars”.
Worse, one-sided information sometimes will end up being published
without being counterbalanced. It’s difficult to envision an open
environment where such conflicts and problems can never arise — what
we can hope to achieve is to create an environment where, through
meritocratic processes, constructive individuals acting in good faith
help to mediate, mitigate, and de-escalate such situations.

One of the more fascinating internal aspects of Wikimedia culture are
the various dispute resolution mechanisms, ranging from mediation
groups over individual moderators (”admins”) to arbitration
committees. This is essentially an attempt to build participatory
structures that help to achieve similar measures of quality control
and enforcement of “ground rules” as editorial processes and control
mechanisms in traditional media — hopefully without being suspect to
the same biases.

I wouldn’t want to live in a world that’s only run in the wiki way –
but at this point, giving up Wikipedia would be almost as hard for me.

OSS: How do you feel sites like Wikipedia have impacted the way society thinks about information and knowledge?
Erik: Essentially, when using Wikipedia, being a critical reader is no
longer optional, it’s required. In that way it’s different from
traditional media, where we are often told that we have to read with a
critical eye (and we do have to!), but in practice, it’s easier not
to. I really hope that the radical transparency of the Wikipedia
engine will lead more and more people to understand the ways in which
knowledge is formed, gathered, verified, and developed, to
participate, and to always question.

OSS: Do you think open source projects will have any impact on the way society itself is structured and how people relate to one another?
Erik: An interesting question! Open source collaboration practices are
certainly making headway elsewhere - wikis, listservs, version control
mechanisms, blog aggregators etc. are all mainstream tools that are
used throughout the corporate world. It’s become almost normal that
tools for better collaboration are themselves the product of open
collaboration, and the principles and ground rules of the open source
movement become more widely accepted as its methods and best practices
proliferate.

OSS: Do you have plans to expand into other areas and make more types of information and media available in the same cooperative way?
Erik: The Foundation acts primarily as a facilitator for a global community
interested in developing and sharing knowledge. So our role is to
figure out ways in which we can broaden the reach of our projects, to
improve the toolset used by contributors, to set up high level
mechanisms for the community to interact, to document best practices,
and so forth. So the answer to your question would be: We plan to
empower people to collaborate in ever richer, more exciting ways when
it comes to developing and disseminating free educational content.

For example, last year, we’ve improved the video and audio embedding
tools in MediaWiki, while still relying completely on open standards
like Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. We’re working with several entities to
explore video & audio collaboration using open source tools and open
codecs. And we’re testing tools for exporting content to PDF, hoping
to also support OpenDocument in the near future.

OSS: Do you have any plans to commercialize all or a part of Wikimedia’s projects, for instance licensing CD volumes or creating “premium” content available at a price?
Erik: We’re certainly not going to create “premium” content - that would be
completely against the spirit of free culture. And we can’t
“license” CD volumes because the content is all freely licensed to
begin with. What we can do, and have done, is license the Wikipedia
brand (logo & name) to third parties for commercial products, so we’ll
probably see a bit more of that: Wikipedia mobile phone portals,
Wikipedia DVDs or USB sticks created by third parties, and so on. We
just have to be careful not to be associated with stuff that’s not in
line with our mission & values.

The ideal business cooperation, from my point of view, is one where we
don’t just generate revenue, but in fact inspire others to adopt open
source methods and practices. The best example of that is our
cooperation with PediaPress.com to bring wiki-to-PDF and “print on
demand” functionality to Wikipedia. PediaPress, in the process of this
cooperation, has released all their code under the BSD license (see
code.pediapress.com).

I strongly believe it’s possible to be both principled and open: To
seek friends & allies, while insisting on standard parameters for
every partnership, and using every opportunity to promote the ethics
of the free culture movement.

If you would like more information about the Charleston Area Linux User Group or to subscribe to the discussion, visit the list’s homepage here.  And keep an eye out for the official Open Source Society discussion group coming soon!

I assumed there were already a billion guides on the internet about how to put together a computer from individual parts, and I wasn’t wrong. What surprised me however was the overall low quality of all these guides. On the few sites where I wasn’t lambasted with popup ads, the guides themselves either assumed too much prior knowledge on the part of the reader, or didn’t offer enough detail about the entire process. I was also surprised by how few pictures there were accompanying most of the guides I found.

That all being said, I did find a very informative video that goes through the entire process step by step with clear instructions and visuals. It is lacking a few details about how to actually get the parts and what to look for doing so, however I plan to fill in some of those gaps here. If you already know how to get parts and what parts to get, you can jump straight to the video here.

First lets look at some reasons you might choose to build your own computer in the first place:

• It’s often much cheaper to build a PC than to buy one pre-built with comparative features. Stories of home builders saving over $1,000 are not uncommon.
• You get exactly the features you want and none of the ones you don’t. PC makers have gotten into the habit of loading their machines with all sorts of bells and whistles that do nothing useful while skimping on the real meat and potatoes components that have an impact on your computer’s performance.
• When people ask you where you got your awesome dream machine, you can proudly proclaim “I built it myself!”
• It’s not nearly as hard as you think. I’ve known old men and small children alike who were able to put together incredible PCs with little if any prior experience.
• It’s good for the environment. Unless you really want to and have the budget, you don’t have to replace most of your existing hardware like keyboard, mouse, monitor, case, and power supply. Unless your current machine is extremely old, these parts will still work. You can use them with your new computer and save some cash and the environment at the same time by not throwing away perfectly good, albeit extremely toxic, used hardware.

The first thing you’ll need to do is get the parts you’ll need. If you’re going to upgrade an existing computer, the only parts you’ll most likely need are a new motherboard, memory, processor (also called a CPU), and hard drive. You will need to make sure the motherboard you get will fit in the case you already have. If you have a case that is large, such as a mid- or full-tower, most any size will work except the extremely small sizes. However if you have a mini-tower or other small case, you may need to research it and find out what “form-factor” or size motherboard you’ll need. If nothing else get out your tape ruler and measure the size of you existing motherboard. Most retailers will list the physical dimensions of their motherboards, and anything within 2 or 3 inches should fit just fine. You also need to pick out a processor that will fit your new motherboard. The easiest way to do this is to get a bundled package, where the processor and motherboard are packaged together and you are assured they will fit one another. Otherwise, you need to pick a processor you like first, and then take note of the “slot” type it uses and make sure the motherboard you pick has the same type of slot. Stay away from cheaper CPUs, they’re cheap for a reason. I personally prefer to use AMD brand chips, as they have a demonstrable edge in performance over Intel chips, however that edge has been getting slimmer lately. Don’t forget the CPU fan too!

Once you have a motherboard and CPU picked out, you’ll need to pick out some memory that will fit your new motherboard. The motherboard specifications will list which type of memory it can use. Most modern motherboards use DDR2 RAM, which is fast. There are two things you need to look for when choosing RAM, size and speed. Most people only look at the size, and as a result they end up with an enormous bank of slow memory, which can cause performance bottlenecks. As of this writing, the fastest RAM you can purchase is around 800MHz, which is plenty good. Don’t get less than 1 gigabyte, and the more you can afford the better. A common mistake people make is in assuming that because they shell out extra cash for a super fast processor, they can get a couple hundred megs of RAM and be fine. However, the speed and size of the memory, as well as the speed of the hard drive and graphics card also have a huge impact on speed. Spend as much on RAM as you can afford, and get the fastest kind possible.

With motherboard, cpu, and RAM out of the way, the next step is choosing a hard drive. Everyone knows bigger is better when it comes to hard drives, however there a couple of details you’ll be wise not to overlook. Newer hard drives have what is called a “cache”, which is a small amount of onboard memory that stores data that has been most frequently accessed recently. This saves wear and tear on the hard drive and makes for quicker data access, since the computer won’t have to search for the same data over and over on the hard drive. Average cache size is around 8MB, but go as high as 16MB or higher, the bigger the better. Then there is the speed of the drive to consider. There are hard drives on the market that can go as fast as 10,000 or even 15,000 RPM, however the thing to be wary of with these drives is that the faster they are, the louder they usually are as well. What good is being able to load cut-scenes blazing fast if your drive is whirring so loud that you can’t hear them? Balance your need for speed against your tolerance for noise. You also need to consider what type of connecting hardware to use. The newest technology is called SATA, which is a few orders of magnitude faster than the previous front-runner which was IDE. You can still find motherboards that support IDE, if you want to reuse your existing IDE hard drive or don’t want to shell out for an upgrade. However, IDE compatible drives and motherboards are getting harder and harder to find, so it’s a much better investment to upgrade to SATA if you can.

The final step is to choose a video card. Most new motherboards come with an on-board video system, however these are never, repeat never suitable for more than internet browsing and word processing. If you plan to do any sort of gaming, or watch movies and DVDs on your computer, you are definitely going to need something with a bit more power. The good news is that decent video cards are pretty cheap. I recently bought a great video card that had DVI and VGA outputs, 128MB on on-board memory, and plays 3D games and movies really well, for $30. It also came with a $20 rebate, so I ended up spending $10 and shipping for an excellent card. You can spend as much as $3,000 for a video card, but consider what you really need and realize that you’re not always getting a better card just because you’re spending extra money. I personally prefer Nvidia brand cards for their wide-ranging support and stability, but despite my personal experiences other users do recommend ATI brand cards as well.

Now you can go on to choose a new case and peripherals if you like, however these items are pretty self-explanatory. They key with these is reading user reviews as much as possible. I’ve come across a lot of cases that looked great, but users reported problems with noise, build quality, cooling issues, and so on.

Now that you’ve got all your components together, its time for the fun part, putting things together. In case you missed the link before, here is the video I found that details the remaining steps very well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVJ5ZEbf6F4

It may seem intimidating at first glance, but building a computer is much easier than it seems. The added bonus is that once you’ve done it, you’ll never forget, and you’ll have something to be proud of that you can actually use or even sell to someone else. Happy building, and don’t forget to send in your questions and comments!