Readers Ask About ... LVM+JFS+RAID

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 Laurens Duijvesteijn asks: I h...

Increase Virtual Partition Storage for VirtualBox

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...

Blog Database Corruption Solved

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...

Readers Ask About ... Virtualization of Services

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 Laurens Duijvesteijn asks: Q2: I read eve...

Readers Ask About ... Using Virtualization with Media Storage

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 Laurens Duijvesteijn...

Readers Ask About ... Hosting Email

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 Laurens Duijvesteijn asks: Q4: Maybe I’ll host...

Git DVCS Server Setup and Use in a Team

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...

New Blog Software and OS

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. ...

Optimized Backups for Physical and Virtual Machines

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...

Web-Based Administrative Tools

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...

Best Practices for Home Desktop Computer Backups

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. Stable / Works Every Time I read a few reviews concerning backu...

USB Storage Still Sucks

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....

Finding Large Files on 1 Partition

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...

Smartphone Lost or Stolen

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...

Outage-Hardware Failure

Over the last few days we had an outage here. A UPS used by the network infrastructure failed and nobody could physically get to it until sometime yesterday. Actually, nobody could trouble shoot the problem to know what actually caused the lack of connectivity. Around here, we don’t have many ...