I don’t know that email firewall is the right term for the ScrollOut F1 toolset, but that’s what the tool claims. It is definitely good at blocking spam. Most people would call this an inbound email gateway.
Setting it up was pretty easy on a stock Ubuntu 12.04 JeOS virtual machine follo...
The last few weeks, we’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 Server for internal testing as a VM host running KVM. The VMs have been a mix of 12.04, 10.04. and 8.04 systems. It has been stable with zero issues on that front. Below are the other changes recently made that you may find interesting....
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 ...
It is no secret that I use rdiff-backup here, extensively. I’m a shell sort of person and like to automate things in shell scripts.
GUI Tools
Not everyone loves CLI/shell computing like I do. A few people won’t look at a solution that doesn’t include a GUI. Good news, JBackpack is...
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...
Sometimes when I look at other people’s code, I cringe. They do not write defensive code, code that prevents common mistakes and helps us find programming errors sooner than later.
Some of these recommendations will slow down your code.
Some will look funny.
Others were hard learned.
You w...
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....
Today I needed to reboot my main desktop to prevent a stupid setup of processes from running. I'm working on a presentation about a backup tool and had kicked off a snapshot. A large number of processes were running, so rather than hunt them all down, I decided that a reboot would be the easiest ...
So I was reading a blog over at ZDNet about why some guy had decided to switch back to Windows from Linux for his server. He says he was ranting, so I'll cut him a little slack. I'm certain the David is a smart guy. I'm not certain he is very smart when it comes to UNIX/Linux administrati...
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...
Life is too short to deal with filing (paper or electronic) very much. We all have better things to do with our time than waste it on excess organization. The goal is to locate a receipt or statement fast enough. Nobody is watching your filing – there is no test later. I can’t speak for...
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...
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 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...
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 ...
