Debian Wi-Fi hotspot using CoovaChilli, FreeRadius, MySQL and daloRADIUS

I decide to create hotspot from my server to allow other connect to Internet for free. I used "Captive portal" solution based on these applications:

• CoovaChilli
• FreeRadius
• MySQL
• daloRADIUS

When somebody wants to connect to Internet using my wifi, the first page he can see is the register/login page (whatever page he wants to visit).
After registration/login he is able to connect to Internet.

So let's see how I did it.

Using Grub2 and LUA installed on USB booting ISO images

I got 16 GB USB flash from my brother, because he can't see me still using my old 64 MB. He decided to buy Imation Nano-Flash-Drive.

Because of many of my friends and colleagues are using Win, I use NTFS on it. Old FAT is not "usable" in these days, because it can't handle bigger files.

From the first time I use USB disks I always want to have bootable disk/flash with live CDs - so here are few notes how to create USB flash drive able to boot stored live CDs:

RAID disk check in Linux

One day I checked dmesg from one of my servers and I saw I/O errors :-(

gate:~ dmesg
...
[ 4220.798665] ide: failed opcode was: unknown                                                    
[ 4220.798665] end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 21067462                                   
[ 4222.983683] hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[ 4222.983683] hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=21067572, sector=21067470
...

Lucky for me there are two disks in RAID 1 so my data was not lost. The machine is "just" firewall, so I decided to play little bit with the bad hard disk, because there are no important data on it. Usually if you see errors like I mentioned above you replace disk without any questions, but I would like to "get" some outputs from diagnostic commands. So you can see what you can do in such case.

Perl Oracle client manual installation to home directory in Debian

I need to connect to the Oracle database in my work to get some data from it. I'm not the Oracle expert, but I decided to use DBD::Oracle.

Most of the manuals and how-to pages describe, how to install client libraries to system (usually as root), which was not my case.

I just need one directory with libraries in my $HOME and few scripts to get some data from the database - no system installations.

Here are the steps how to install DBD-Oracle and it's libraries to "one" directory without doing mess in the system: