In my research for the last article on USB storage and KVM clients, I came across a few articles that should improve disk performance.
I also decided to tweak some HDD performance parameters. The commands used and results are below. If you have a disk array, you probably want to tune the parameters t...
After getting Windows7 Media Center running in a KVM Virtual Machine a few weeks ago, I’ve been mostly happy … except that the Recorded TV/ folder available it too small.
USB2 Storage
In an attempt to provide more room for these recordings, I created a 388MB raw disk on an external USB2 d...
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...
Updated 10/2019
Use ed25519 keys, if you can:
ssh-keygen -t ed25519
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub userid@remote
Updated 10/2015
If you have an ssh server running on your network that is accessible to the outside world, on the internet, chances are your systems are being attacked. If you aren&#...
Below is the 6th 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 |
Part 5 – Reverse Proxies
duijf as...
Below is the 5th 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:
Q5: Do I need a revers...
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...
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...
This morning I saw an email from a business associate. It contained a link to an article on LinkedIn. That article was actually hosted on mashup. The article was about Social Media Overload; he called it The Sharepocalypse. After reading a fairly long article pointing out all the issues with the ...
There’s an old SSL/TLS security hole (from 11/2009) that has been out and patched for over a year (since 2/2010), but it appears that many major websites haven’t bothered patching it. CVE-2009-3555
The guys over at ssltls.de have a list. Seems that consistently patching is tough for man...
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...
Timeline
9/10 President of Microsoft’s Business division leaves to become Nokia’s CEO
9/14 Nokia World doesn’t mention MeeGo at all
Nokia Leaves MeeGo Alliance
2/10 Nokia and Microsoft form a partnership to push Windows Mobile7 on Nokia phones
A few links
New CEO
MeeGo not ...
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.
...
Stolen from my comment over at LH …
Launch a Distributed Denial Of Service attack, DDoS
Setup your own botnet
Spread spyware
Release huge password databases
Release hacks for PS3s
Most of the time, Cloud Computing = Careless Computing.
Just because something is free and easy, doesn’...
You visit a web site and like the article enough to want to post a comment … of some kind. Then the website has a block that prevents you from posting. Comment-blocking. They do this by:
login required or
3rd party service for comments
non-working captcha
requiring javascript for commenti...
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...
If you want to learn something about Linux, there are a wide range of learning materials available out there.
Much is for beginners, but there are some intermediate and advanced course materials available too.
The best place to begin is with the documentation from your distribution.
CentOS Docs
Re...
Here’s a simple one question test for whether you have good backups or not.
Question: If any of your main hard disks started making a loud clicking sound right now does that idea freak you out or make you nervous?
If you have any answer beside, “No, bring it on” then your backups ar...
For the last few months, X/Windows has locked up without warning on one of my fastest systems (Core i5). This is very unusual. I’ve run Linux systems for over 17 years and X has never been this bad. Never. About every 3 years X/Windows would lockup, but it has happened at least every 4 days for...
Each of us use a computer for various reasons. Some just want a system that works, without any hassle. Most of us want to run specific software, work with specific file types, connect with everyone else, and possibly just do what the people around us are doing to be the same.
I’ll be as honest ...
Today a friend sent an email with a Gnome helper app to setup a panel so remote ssh logins could be added to the Gnome Panel. There are lots of applications, or applets, like this out there. They all read and edit config files and provide a GUI to do something that has been possible for years and ye...
This Cyberciti.biz article explains settings and techniques to increase the default RAID re-build performance from 4k to 51k in his example. The key settings were
Increase the speed limit max by adding dev.raid.speed_limit_max = 500000 to /etc/sysctl.conf
Enable bitmaps during the rebuild and dis...
Cron has been around since the beginning of UNIX systems. It is a scheduler that will run programs or scripts periodically when scheduled. The scheduling can be for a specific time annually or at the same minute every hour or any period between those. The hardest part for me is recalling the specific...
