user: Pavel Beňak (aries) Joins Portland (xdg-utils)

Posted by Benjamin Close on May 29, 2009 under FreeDesktop | Be the First to Comment

Please welcome  Pavel Beňak (aries)  to the FD.o crew. Pavel will be working on portland and xdg-utils.

user: Joel Bosvend – GSOC Input Redirection

Posted by Benjamin Close on under FreeDesktop | Read the First Comment

Please welcome Joel Bosvend (b0le) to the FD.o ranks. Joel will be working on Input Redirection in the Xserver as part of a Google Summer of Code project. Peter Hutterer is his mentor.

www: spectre & swfdec moin wiki’s upgraded/cleaned up

Posted by Benjamin Close on May 28, 2009 under FreeDesktop | Be the First to Comment

To combat spam both the spectre and swfdec wiki’s have been upgraded to a later version of moin. Capta’s have been put in place and all existing spam has been removed. Sorry, probably a few broken links due to this change but shouldn’t be too hard to clean up.

Using Google Adsense to make money

Posted by Benjamin Close on May 25, 2009 under Money | Be the First to Comment

It’s been a while since my last blog post on making money online but it doesn’t mean I’ve not been thinking about how to do it. Past blog articles have indicated some ways to make money online but never really talked about how effective the various methods are. Well this blog article talks about one method that apparently most people who try and make money online use initially. That is Google Adsense.

Why is it the first method people use? Word of mouth seems to be the main reason – after all that’s the reason I decided to try it. So what is Google adsense? It’s simply a means provided by Google to allow them to advertise on your website. If you look at this website you’ll see a number of Adverts. At the time of writing most of these are provided by Google Adsense.

Adsense provides a nice friendly interface to being able to setup and configure how and what type of advert you can see on a website. It allows you to chose the size colours and a few other things about the adverts. Once you’ve selected what you want you get provided with some special html code that must be put on any web page you want adverts to display on. Below is a sample of the code provided by Google:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-8063328086245449";
google_ad_slot = "2786071329";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
//-->

The result of this code is something like the below image (which is the top advert on this website)

Once adverts start appearing on your website, you slowly start to earn money. What adverts get shown I hear you asking. Well Google scans your website and picks adverts which are relevant to your site’s content. They even target the ads on a per-page setting. Which is really quite good as adverts relevant to a page are more likely to get people to click on them.

You see Google pays for two things:

• PPC – Pay per Click
• PPV – Pay per view / PPI Pay per impression

Pay per view or pay per impression means you get paid to have the advert simply shown on the website. Pay Per Click means you get paid if someone clicks on the advert. Pay per click is by far the more profitable of the two. However depending on your website audience, pay per view is more likely than pay per click.

At this point you might be thinking – wow I get about 300 visitors a day to my website, if they each view a page that’s say 300cents. If only that was the case! The reality is PPC and PPV don’t pay much. You generally only get fractions of a cent for each. Clearchain for instance has been runing these adverts almost since it was setup. The results – well as you learn more about how things work, you setup more and you also make more web pages hence earn more. Below you can see a snapshot of the income from Clearchain.com using Adsense.

As you can see the income certainly isn’t staggering but small amounts all add up. The April figure is based on 3302 impressions and 13 clicks. Clearchain also doesn’t get a lot of traffic hence if you had a website which got lots of traffic then you could potentially get quit a nice income.

So Adsense is certainly one way to make money on the web. If you have a website with lots of content, and lots of visitors – try Adsense as it does work, just not as fast as you’ld expect. It won’t make you a millionaire over night, well at least not in my experience. Though if you checkout some blogs there is certainly some big money earners in Adsense.

There was movement at the station… Our Driveway is in!

Posted by Benjamin Close on May 18, 2009 under Country Living | Read the First Comment

It’s been a while in the making but our access track (aka driveway) is done! Starting last Sunday, the driveway was started and finished the following Tuesday. The driveway was constructed of 25mm gravel and took 155 tonnes of the stuff! The driveway is 255 metres long and it’s funny it sort of goes to nowhere at the moment – whilst we wait for our house /shed to be started. You might say we have a road to nowhere Below are a few progress and finalised snapshots.

19 weeks and counting

Posted by Benjamin Close on under Life | Read the First Comment

Wow how time flies! Carly is now 159weeks pregnant and now definately showing. Last week we had the first real scan and got to see hands and feet, the bub was quite active and gave the radiologist a hard time! Below are a few photos of both the bub and the expectant Mum to be!

Booting FreeBSD from a root zfs pool using a standard MBR and partition table

Posted by Benjamin Close on May 8, 2009 under FreeBSD | 3 Comments to Read

This page documents the current state of play for booting the root filesystem (/) off a zfs zpool under FreeBSD, using a standard master boot record (MBR) and a standard partition table. The aim was to be able to have a dual boot system for my laptop using the standard FreeBSD quick selection boot loader.

Note, this does not cover using the gpt based partition tables. If you want to use these, please refer to the following page: http://lulf.geeknest.org/blog/freebsd/Setting_up_a_zfs-only_system/ or booting zfs as root using a small ufs boot partition as provided by the instructions at: http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSOnRoot.

Below is the steps required to be able to setup the root zpool

1. Download a FreeBSD -current fixit cdrom snapshot later than 200901, as these have loader ZFS support
2. Burn the CD
3. Boot the CD
4. Setup any partitions you want – note you must setup the ‘a’ partition to cover the entire device as the loader will use this.
5. Select Fixit from the menu, and use the CDrom as a source
6. Create the pool and install the loader (see below)
7. Copy the required files to boot (see below)

Creating the root zpool and installing the Loader

The fixit cd has everything required to create a zpool, however by default none of the required modules are loaded. Hence they need to be loaded first:

cd /mnt2/boot/kernel
kldload ./opensolaris.ko

kldload ./zfs.ko

Once the modules have been loaded all the zfs tools (zpool,zfs,zdb) should now work. Let assume you want to install FreeBSD to /dev/ad4s2 (second partition on a sata disk). You can do this using:

    zpool create somename /dev/ad4s2

Where somename is the name of the pool you want to create. This creates a single zfs filesystem and a zfs pool of storage. To install the boot loader you need to do:

    # dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/da0s1 count=1
    # dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/da0s1 skip=1 seek=1024

The first line installs boot1, the second line installs boot2.  However, boot2 is responsible for loading boot3 (aka the loader – found in /boot/loader). Hence that must be put in place.

Copying the required files to boot

The easiest way to get things to the point where things are ready to boot is to copy all the files from /dist  - the live distribution. Before you do this, you might like to take advantage of zfs and create some subfilesystems so you can snapshot, monitor space, etc.

For instance creating a /usr and /var filesystem is often very handy:

    #zfs create somename/usr
    #zfs create somename/var

Now you can copy the base system:

    cp -a /dist/* /somename

This will install among other things:

• /somename/boot/kernel/kernel  - FreeBSD kernel
• /somename/boot/kernel/opensolaris.ko – zfs dependency
• /somename/boot/kernel/zfs.ko – module understanding zpools/zfs
• /somename/boot/loader  - the FreeBSD loader
  

At this point you need to replace the loader with one that understands zfs. You can download the loader from: (To be advise – see cavet below)
And if you have a usb stick copy it in place using:

   mount_msdos /dev/da0s1 /mnt
   cp /mnt/loader /somename/boot

Finally you have to tell FreeBSD where to mount filesystems on a standard boot:

   zfs set mountpoint=/var somename/var
   zfs set mountpoint=/usr somename/usr

At this point any command you type will now probably fail indicating it’s missing some shared library. This is because /usr has now changed. You can get around this by telling the loader where to find valid libraries:

   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/mnt2/lib

Next we need to build the zfs cache. This is used by zfs mount to automatically mount zfs filesystems by /etc/rc.d/zfs at boot time. It’s also used to determine if a filesystem is local to the system or belongs to an exported pool.

   mkdir /boot/zfs
   mkdir /somename/boot/zfs
   cd /
   zfs export somename
   zfs import -f somename
   cp /boot/zfs/zfs.cache /somename/boot/zfs/

Finally we tell the loader where we want to boot from and set the init scripts to automatically start all zfs filesystems:

    echo 'zfs_enable="YES"' > /somename/etc/rc.conf
    echo 'zfs_load="YES"' > /somename/boot/loader.conf
    echo 'vfs.root.mountfrom="zfs:somename"' >> /somename/boot/loader.conf

And set the root filesystem to a legacy mountpoint (so zfs mount -a won’t try and mount an already mounted filesystem)

     zfs set mountpoint=legacy somename

At this point you can reboot and things should now boot!
Update: 20090809

There has been a lot of updates to instructions along the way. There are now official ZFS on Root instructions available using GPT/MBR/other available at: http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS