Part of my day to day activities is to support RedHat Enterprise Linux on the desktop. To demo software that runs natively on Linux, I firmly believe that the only bottleneck should be the system itself: no virtualization, no networking, … Continue reading
Category Archives: System Administration
One of the things I enjoy about computing is trying something silly, just to see what happens. Ever wonder what a live well of rainbow trout looks like as a QR code video? Well, look no further! The tools involved … Continue reading
Ever have a hard drive go bad, yet hesitate to RMA it? That’s understandable. Who knows what people on the other end will do, once it is repaired. Once simple solution is to encrypt the contents of the hard disk. … Continue reading
In prepping some RHEL 5.5 laptops, I noticed something odd. Very odd. I had made some changes to a base system and did an rsync -av -n from the base system to a pristine source installation to see what had … Continue reading
Upon the most undignified death of our Macbook Pro 2.2, we have since acquired a new Macbook, running Lion. Not surprisingly, my Linux based AFP server needed an update. Code: Netatalk 2.2.1, from http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/. Berkeley DB 4.8.30, from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/berkeleydb/downloads/index-082944.html After … Continue reading
What is a shell, and why do I care about its prompt? A shell is nothing more than a program, serving two purposes. One is to interact with human beings. The other is to prep and start other programs. For … Continue reading
Every so often, I need to mount a filesystem that exists within a logical volume or sparse file. This means delicately treading around the boot sector, or other partitions. Linux has a nifty command, called losetup, from the util-linux package. … Continue reading
Let’s face it. Sometimes you have a need for network wide access via SSH. Port redirection does not cut it, and PermitTunnel may be disabled. Here is an old school program that works very well: slirp. Slirp was born in … Continue reading
As a system administrator, upon occasion you get a rare request. One of these crossed my desk the other day. A student asked if he could map the US keyboard over to the Dvorak key mappings. My first inclination was … Continue reading
Recently I had an Xvfb session in place, using x11vnc as a connection method. Upon login, I saw the following errors: Error activating XKB configuration. Probably internal X server problem. X server version data: The X.Org Foundation 60802000 If you … Continue reading