SMS emulator with original pads

I have always liked the SEGA consoles (and games) more than the Nintendo stuff. So I decided to install an emulator for my old SEGA Master System games and build an adapter to play the SMS games with the original gamepad on my old 650MHz Notebook. The reason that I play the games on my old notebook is simple: I have no new workstation or notebook with a parallel port anymore. Before you start make sure that your parallel port supports EPP:

Creating an LDAP based address book

Imagine you have a small company with one manager, his secretary and a couple of workers. Each of these guys needs their own space to store some contacts, eg. the manager needs to store some manager contacts, the secretary needs to store some secretary contacts and workers need to store some contact about sales guys. At this point you need to create an organizational unit for your address book with more organizational units in it for all workers etc:

LDAP for Solaris 10

With this article I want you to show how to set up OpenLDAP for Solaris 10. I have here a small Sun Fire V100 with 2GB running - perfect for playing around. Using Solaris as a LDAP client is a little bit strange first, but with the time you will enjoy it. Solaris comes with a tool called ldapclient to initiate a Solaris host as a LDAP client. There is a daemon called ldap_cachemgr which will be started when you initialize Solaris as a LDAP client and it runs all the time.

SNES emulator with original pads

If you are a retro gamer like me then you know emulators. With emulators you can play variuos games of old consoles. Less known is the ability to connect the original gamepads to your computer. In most cases you need to build or buy an adapter. With this article I want you to show how to connect the original SNES gamepads to your parallel port on your PC and play games with them. I have build an adapter out of my old SNES console to keep the original gamepads intact. Before youthink about building an adapter for yourself make sure that your parallel port supports EPP: 

Streaming audio server with Icecast (OGG/MP3)

Creating your own internet radio station isn't very hard. There is a nice software called Icecast which can do it for you. Icecast was designed to stream any audio file if a appropiate streaming client is available. For OGG/Vorbis you can use ices and for MP3 icegenerator. Here is a small tutorial how to setup Icecast for streaming OGG/Vorbis and MP3. I am using Slackware Linux again.
This article contains the following topics:

Slackware package management

Introduction

The Slackware package management is one of the easiest to understand and to use. All packages are just ordinary compressed (gzip) tar files, since Slackware 13.37 the tar files are compressed with xz. All files in the package are already at their places except for the leading slash. Symbolic links will be created during package instalation. To look into a package you can use tar. First make sure you have access to the packages, eg. mount the CD/DVD iso image: 

PPPD with PAM/LDAP

This article is an update to the prior released article Setting up a pppd server. In this article I want you to show how to setup PPPD with authentication against LDAP using PAM in Slackware. How to setup LDAP and PAM in Slackware is described here: LDAP for Slackware Linux
Normally pppd looks for users and their passwords that may login via PPP in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets, /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. But when you are using LDAP for your users then you need to use PPP with PAM and LDAP.

IMAP server with dovecot

If you need an IMAP server then dovecot might be the right one for you. It is very easy to install and to configure. This article is a short description how to install and configure dovecot 2.0.16 in Slackware. This description should also work for Solaris. The features in this description are the following:

Migrating /etc/protocols into LDAP

The file /etc/protocols contains information about the protocols and their numbers. To be honest, until I tried to put every database into LDAP  that getent can handle I did not recognized or cared about the file /etc/protocols...
Before you continue reading keep in mind that I had serious trouble with my server while looking up for /etc/protocols in my LDAP. Currently I don't use it anymore just like my prior released article about migrating /etc/services into LDAP.

Migrating /etc/services into LDAP

Before you continue reading you should know that migrating /etc/services into LDAP may refuses your system to boot. I had plenty of trouble with /etc/services in LDAP, that is why I don't use it anymore. The next point is that you may use different operating systems. In this case the content of /etc/services may differ. When I take a look at /etc/services in Slackware, I have three entrys for port 1: