I’ve grown more and more accustomed to that phrase. Being on IRC, blogs, forums, mailing lists, and other forms of digital social gathering, it still never ceases to amaze me the responses that come out of people these days. Case in point? The tragic ending to what should have been a happy one. I’m referring [...]
I was faced with an interesting challenge tonight. But first, why I was faced with the challenge to begin with. I had been teaching Linux to system administrators for more than a year before taking my current job as a system administrator myself. During a couple of the courses, the students had the chance to [...]
DISCLAIMER: This works on Debian testing, Debian unstable, Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10. I have not verified it to work on other systems. If you hose your box, because you gave it a try, and it didn’t work, don’t blame me. You’re the stupid one for trying it out on a production machine. If you’re [...]
For those looking to put their CPU to work on their computer, I have the perfect job for you: Distributed.net! There’s no doubt that many of you already are participating in some distributed computing project, such as SETI@home, or Folding@home, BOINC, or others. I have joined different distributed computing projects in the past, and currently, [...]
I have a love/hate relationship with Debian. It is a solid operating system, with a lot of potential. When initially released in 1993, then following the subsequent years, Debian wan innovative. It was one of the first distributions to introduce package management that resolves dependencies, and it did so well. Leaving Debian decoupled, so it [...]
Taking a break from the humdrum LZMA stuff, I thought I would share with you what I use in my backpack to keep my systems in line. You may or may not of thought about this, and I hope you find it useful. Bootable CDs First, on the list is CDs. Seeing as though we [...]
There’s been some stagnation lately with the project. I think we’ve all gotten used to the number of teams in the United States, and just became satisfied with the current condition of things. Well, things are about to turn around with the project. We’re going to reach new heights that we haven’t met before, however, [...]
Wikimedia is moving all 400 of its servers from Red Hat and Fedora to Ubuntu 8.04. After reading the article in its entirety, a few thoughts were going through my head. First, was why not CentOS? Wikimedia mentions that they are running different versions of Red Hat and Fedora, which is a problem in itself [...]
Yesterday, while students were working on labs, and I was bored stiff, I decided to update my Irssi installation running on my Debian SPARC box. I spent some time cleaning up the config (not by hand, mind you, but through the options in the interface) by updating the servers I connect to, the channels I [...]
I wanted a different ASCII art signature for my @ubuntu.com email address than I had for my personal account, so I took a couple minutes, and hacked one up together pretty quickly. It’s only 3 lines, which is appropriate for an email signature I believe. It’s not perfect, but it conveys the idea. ,-O Ubuntu [...]
Today, I found myself featured on the Linux Haters Blog. I’ve heard of this blog before, but didn’t give it much thought, as most of the posts coming from the author are nothing more than Microsoft fan-boy fanaticism. It’s hard to take any of the posts seriously. After reading his post regarding a couple of [...]
This may be old hat for some, but I just discovered today that it is possible to have duplicate user IDs on the same Linux machine. The ‘useradd’ and ‘adduser’ commands will not allow it: root@kratos:~# useradd -u 0 test_root useradd: UID 0 is not unique However, not to fear. Hand-editing the /etc/passwd file is [...]
I know this is old hat, as I’ve seen it on the blogosphere for a couple of weeks now, but I can’t help but post about it myself. Ubuntu Linux is selling at Best Buy for only $20.00. I have yet to grab a copy myself, but plan on doing so as soon as I [...]
Last week, my wife called me to tell me that we had been infected by a virus and that she couldn’t get online without her browser being forwarded to inappropriate sites. Further, there were new icons on the desktop, nasty messages popping up all over the workspace, and a saturated network. Sounds like more than [...]
A couple recent posts have started on the Utah Open Source Planet regarding popd and pushd not being available on a default Ubuntu install. As discovered, popd and pushd are shell built-ins for the BASH shell, and not provided by the Debian Almquist Shell (DASH). Why has Ubuntu made the change from BASH to DASH [...]
