When you lose a smartphone, all sorts of personal and proprietary data may become available to the finder/thief. Recently, a friend had a smartphone that I’d given to him stolen, so some of my personal and proprietary data may have been on that device still. Below I’ll attempt to outlin...
Updated: June 2021
Transitioning from Windows or OSX to Linux can be difficult because the OSes have different philosophies. The idea that there needs to be a single app that does x+y+z+a+b+c isn’t how Linux/UNIX apps have been built historically. But that is the way that MS-Windows apps are bu...
This week my main file server hit 100% utilization on the main, /, partition. Normally, only 4GB or so is used on the 20GB partition. Something was wrong.
To find big files on just the root partition, use:
sudo find / -type f -size +200M -xdev
The -xdev switch tells find to stay on the same partiti...
Read an article over at LH earlier this week that convinced me to buy some more backup storage before the price hikes rippled through the external storage market like they already had for the internal HDD market. What? you ask? The price for internal drives has change from $65 to $129 for a slow 1....
The Checklist
Stable / Works Every Time
Automatic
Different Storage Media
Fast
Efficient
Secure
Versioned
Offsite / Remote
Restore Tested
When you are looking for a total backup solution, those are the things you want from it....
It happened again to another website. Their password database was stolen. The entire DB. At least they were encrypting user passwords in some way. That will slow down the crackers, a little, but in the end, almost all those passwords will be known. My readers know that only the longest passwords w...
My old backup method was a little cumbersome. To ensure a good backup set, I’d take down the virtual machine, mount the VM storage on the host (Xen), then perform an rdiff-backup of the entire file system, before bringing the VM back up again. This happened daily, automatically, around 3:30am...
Since this is a technology blog, I figure some of you may be interested in a major change that happened out of necessity here today.
This is the very first blog article on our new physical server, running in a completely different virtual machine. For the next week, everything here is a test.
...
It seems that all the software developers are using git DVCS these days. I haven’t done serious software development in many years, so I’ve been using RCS all this time for my system admin scripting needs. With my new development work, I need to upgrade my toolset to a DVCS – Distr...
Below is the 4th of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinions. ;)
Previous articles:
Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization | Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage
duijf asks:
Q4: Maybe I’ll host the email for my own d...
Below is the 3rd of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinions. ;)
Previous articles:
Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization | Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage | Part 4 – Hosting Email
duijf asks:
Q3: I intent (si...
Below is the 2nd of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinion. ;)
Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization | Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage | Part 4 – Hosting Email
duijf asks:
Q2: I read everywhere about Virtualis...
Sometime on Monday the database that we run our blog software on became corrupted to the point that accessing the blog wasn’t possible for hours, perhaps many, many hours.
I don’t know how long the error existed, just that I created a few new articles in the morning and didn’t check...
This weekend, my 3 yr old VirtualBox VDI storage for this, my primary virtual machine, was getting close to 100% filled. It was a 10G partition that started out as a 6.06 installation, then was upgraded to 8.04 and finally to 32-bit Ubuntu Server running 10.04. To get a GUI, I added LXDE a few minu...
Below is the first of 6 questions from a reader. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m not short on opinion. ;)
Part 1 – LVM+JFS+RAID | Part 2 – Service Virtualization | Part 3 – Virtualizing Media Storage | Part 4 – Hosting Email
duijf asks:
I have a total of 5 qu...
Bare with me here. This is a great technique. I think you’ll thank me later after doing what this article suggests.
Homes and businesses today have lots of network devices. Using DHCP is the easiest way to get those on the network, but if you ever want those different devices to talk to each o...
May 2021 Update
Added kernel, header, module removed command to purge them from APT.
Clarified /forcefsck options, slightly.
Jan 2020 Update
A little cleanup.
June 2018 Update
The big ideas below haven’t changed. Really the main change is to using apt instead of aptitude or apt-get for pac...
Today I wanted to add another OS to a netbook, an Asus Eee. My common practice is to boot a gparted ISO from a USB flash drive, move some data and partitions around and add a new logical partition to the end of the extended partition space. Write everything back out to disk. Then I’d boot th...
Sometimes you don’t need the best quality or performance from a device, you just need it to work good enough for a purpose. I wanted a cheap NAS for my home network that supported 2 USB connected storage devices. No high performance needed, just easy access to disks over the network. No RAID.
...
An article on Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome that spells out some interesting points.
Still Need MS-Windows – Probably
Sadly, even if you do change to Linux for your daily use system, you’ll still probably need a Windows machine to run some software like TurboTax or the latest games. Th...
I like backups. I like them more since losing many, many GBs of data over a decade ago – before I got backup religion.
Many of the long term readers know that I’m always looking for a better backup method.
Back-In-Time
Rdiff-backup Isn’t Perfect
VM-Explorer for Backups
I’ve bee...
By some standards, my 10,000+ digital photo collection is either very large or trivial. I suspect that professional photographers probably have hundreds of thousands of photos. Many of those will have different post-processing.
Organizing, backing up and archiving digital photos and images doesn̵...
I was going to create a Top 10 List of 2010 here. Then started looking through the articles and some constant themes can out.
Virtualization For Desktops and Servers
Tagged as Virtualization
Laptop Virtualization
VirtualBox Performance Tips
VirtualBox on Ubuntu
KVM on Ubuntu
Win7 and...
Last week, I visited some relatives. Their computer running MS-WindowsXP had at least 1 rootkit installed and a number of viruses and spywares. This machine was running Firefox with NoScript (disabled) and Thunderbird for email. The main user is not very technical, but uses Firefox, Thunderbird, Qui...
We all get computer viruses, eventually. There is nothing anyone can do, but whether it is a small inconvenience or a major computer-doesn’t-work-for-weeks issue is up to you.
It doesn’t matter which operating system you have. Viruses have been written for it. It is true that since 92% o...
