A whole 'nother level of geekdom.

Two days ago, me and two friends spent about 8 hours in my 15 degree garage "linuxing". Box A was a server running the new dual core atom 330, and Box B was an old Pentium IV box. We'll start with Box A:

Debian 5 Lenny (i386) was actually a breeze to install, except when we went to install grub it defaulted to hd(0) which was a compact flash card on the motherboard, removed that, reinstalled (just goes quicker) and it was up and running. Since it had no wireless card, I had previously saved several debian packages to a flash drive for installation (such as openssh-server) and installed them after I spent an hour trying to figure out how to mount the drive. I feel a bit foolish actually, I tried pretty much every argument and every configuration of 'mount', but the reason it was not working was simply because I didn't specify a partition. I typed 'mount /dev/sdb /media/Lexar' when I should have typed '/dev/sdb1'. Got that mounted, installed the openssh-server and openssh-blacklist packages, and powered down the box. Then I took it upstairs and plugged it into the router, configured /etc/networking/interfaces to auto connect to an ethernet connection and removed all the peripherals leaving the server on.

We went back to the garage to work on Box B, which was to become a dedicated bittorrent box, and simultaneously worked on the Debian Box off of my laptop via ssh. The Debian box was to become a CSS (Counter Strike Source) server, so we configured that using the following sequence of commands (obtained from this guide:):

$ mkdir srcds
$ cd srcds
$ wget http://www.cstrike-planet.com/dls/hldsupdatetool.bin (usb)
$ chmod +x hldsupdatetool.bin
$ ./hldsupdatetool.bin
$ chmod +x steam
$ ./steam -command update -game "Counter-Strike Source" -dir .
$ ./srcds_run -game cstrike -autoupdate +maxplayers 20 +map de_aztec > srcds.log 2>&1 &

We then ran the server and checked the logs. Everything seemingly went fine except three textures were missing from the map. It was at this point we gave up for the night so I am unsure as to whether it was that particular map, or if there is a deeper problem at hand. We'll figure it out eventually.

While configuring the Debian CSS dedi over ssh, we also worked on the bittorrent box, which contains a rather ingenious little integration of mine that uses an aim client to add .torrents to Vuze's queue. We installed Mint 8 on the box which took about a year and a half running off the live CD, then installed the latest version of Vuze from their website (version in repos is really outdated. Using Pidgin's autoaccept plugin, we configured an aim account running on Pidgin that would autoaccept file transfers from my friend's screen name and save them in ~/Uploads. Firstly the plugin must be enabled, then on the buddy list you must right click the screename you want to authorize then go to autoaccept and always allow. Next, we configured Vuze to automatically scan that directory (~/Uploads) every 60 seconds for new .torrents, copy them to ~/Torrents, and add them to it's queue. Finally we set both Pidgin and Vuze to launch at login (During Mint 8 install we opted to not require login, ergo when the power button is pressed you are taken to the desktop, not the login window) and voila!

I eventually want to get vnc working on the bittorrent box, as well as actually play a game of CSS on the server but yesterday I was just too tired and wound up laying in bed all day watching a Law and Order: SVU marathon. I'll eventually write up a more complete (with pictures) guide on how to get the Pidgin/Vuze integration too.