Linux

With updates going on in the last couple of months for various packages, such as OpenSSL and GLibC which have fixed a number of important security vulnerabilities, I thought I might share a one liner that might save you one day. sudo lsof -n | grep -v \#prelink\# | grep -e ‘\.so’ | grep -e […]

Last week I spoke at SydPHP, which was hilariously horrible due to my lack of public speaking skills. During my Introduction to Laravel & Composer there was a very interesting question posted asking about an issue that he came across while developing a cron that was running on his server. The process was set to […]

I know I might bag out CentOS at the best of times, but Karanbir Singh – our fearless leader of all CentOS developers has announced the immediate availability of CentOS-5.7 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures. Well, what are you waiting for? yum upgrade.

Yesterday I posted about having an existing ssh-agent load on all new shells. Here are two more handy snippets of code from my .bash_profile The first code snippet is a follow on from yesterday, were I can type ‘lock’ or ‘unlock’ into my shell and the ssh-agent will follow on accordingly. When your ssh-agent is […]

I love ssh-agent, but always found that running source ~/.ssh.agent annoyed me! That was before I wrote this code, which I absolutely love: source ~/.ssh.agent PID=$SSH_AGENT_PID if [ -f /proc/$SSH_AGENT_PID/cmdline ]; then CMD=`cat /proc/$SSH_AGENT_PID/cmdline`; if [ “$CMD” != “ssh-agent” ] ; then PID=0 fi else PID=0 fi; if [ “$PID” -eq 0 ]; then ssh-agent […]

I love RedHat Linux. I think it is a beautiful piece of engineering. Hundreds of thousands of man hours spent ensuring systems that have packages installed keep running. Continuously. One thing however that I have found is that my favorite RHEL clone for years, CentOS has been slacking. Bad. For example, RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 […]

I love Android, and I love that Google is offering such a good mobile operating system, for free. Many people might just remember that Microsoft grew to prominence in the IT industry in much a similar way. They provided DOS for free (or at least at a low cost) to OEMs, which provided them with […]

Looking at my emails, I just realised that I forgot to pay for Drupal Downunder. -.-“

Hello Linux Conference, I can’t wait until you begin!

Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the latest update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, release 5.6 (with kernel-2.6.18-238.el5)! In virtualisation land, one of the major changes have been the addition of the virtio balloon driver. This new driver in Red Hat 5.6 allows guests to express to the hypervisor how much […]

*sigh* [tim@beast ~]$ df / -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/disk/by-uuid/ebc29b81-cc7e-4fa5-9777-8953f54752ff 9.9G 9.3G 70M 100% / Why oh why do I do this to myself?

A typical day’s worth of updating my machines usually looks a bit like this: [tim@myhost tmp]$ sudo pacman -Syu :: Synchronizing package databases… core is up to date extra is up to date community is up to date multilib is up to date :: Starting full system upgrade… warning: gnome-disk-utility: ignoring package upgrade (2.30.1-1 => […]

When you look at the Linux landscape, there are traditionally two companies which are well known for lacking support when it comes to Linux. ATI and Broadcom. Well, good news when looking at the Broadcom landscape! Broadcom, well known for frequently holding out when it came to delivering drivers – especially Wi-Fi drivers and source […]

Quick and simple MAC address generator: dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=3 2>/dev/null | od -tx1 | head -1 \ | cut -d’ ‘ -f2- | awk ‘{ print “00:50:19:”$1″:”$2”:”$3 }’ I normally have this set up as an alias in my profile under ‘mac’.

When it comes to companies that create multimedia codecs, I have followed none closer then that of On2 Technologies. On2 came to my attention when TrueMotion VP3 was released as Open Source Software in late 2001. On2 released the source code of their VP3 codec. They irrevocably disclaimed all rights to the codec and gave […]

Want to know what the status is of CentOS 6 is and how far away it is to being completed? There is a page on the CentOS wiki which contains a list of all the packages which the developers are currently focusing their attention on. Head over to http://wiki.centos.org/QaWiki/6/AuditStatus for more information on the status […]

Getting the latest (mainline) Linux kernel is easy, you just head over to kernel.org and click the first ‘Full Source’ link that you see. When it comes to Xen, it’s so hard that even the official Xen Wiki can’t really find a simple download and configuration link. After running Andrew Lyon’s Gentoo patches for Xen […]

Do you like testing and writing documentation for new and exciting applications? I am currently working on a new enterprise application which will simplify the deployment of new machines in a Unix network. It’s literally plug, deploy and play! I can’t really tell that much just yet on what the application actually does, that’s top […]

When you have more then three servers to monitor, automating the installation of NRPE is a must! At Digital Pacific, the configurations that I have written are very versatile, there is about ten main lines, and adding or removing a server from that line determines what services will be monitored and how. I have built […]

This is the bad thing about running a distro that releases up to date software. Eventually you will get 276 package updates.

When I faced with a decision of what web server I am going to roll out with, I usually end up picking between two web servers: Apache and Cherokee. Apache is like your grandfather. He is 80 years old, and He has been around for a while. He is not always the guy you go […]

If you have never used NoMachine before, it is a fantastic technology that allows you to have a Terminal Server for X on Linux, similar to XenApp for Windows. It is a very powerful application. I used to install FreeNX back in the day when it was released, but I have since learnt that it […]

I was just booting up my Mac to take some nice pretty screenshots of my cluster install process, and I realised that NoMachine’s client for OS X does not even properly support Intel CPU’s -.-” Anyways, unlike Adobe porting Creative Suite to Linux, at least NoMachine are actually working on it.

I would like to introduce you tonight to a x-part series (I don’t know how many parts there are at the moment, we will see as time progresses) entitled “How to build a www cluster in x days“. In this series, we will be looking at a wide variety of different techniques that can be […]