UNIX SysAdmin: erem-ef

Padre 0.36 released

Sat, 30 May 2009 07:00:02 GMT

On behalf on Padre's development team, I am happy to announce that Padre 0.36 has been released. This release prides itself with quite a long change list, including:

fix of the darn cut/copy/paste bug... err, feature;
many usability fixes Samuel Johnson once said that silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say. That's true, the longer I did not write anything here the harder it was for me to find a thing to write about. Or maybe I was just too busy with other stuff... Today, I received an e-mail from Toolbox that begun with: "Have you thought about blogging but haven't gotten

Sunday evening musing

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:50:41 GMT
It's Sunday evening here. I'm sitting with a laptop on my... er, laps... watching some Iron Maiden and Transatlantic vids, drinking whiskey and enjoying my only day off this weekend.

Of /var and role playing

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:41:44 GMT
Chris Siebenmann's yesterday post The problem with /var today reminded me of an interview question I was once asked. It went somewhere along these lines: "Let's suppose a /var filesystem on one of your machines is filling up quickly (which might be fraught with consequences especially on AIX), what would you do to remedy this situation?". So, I went through the process of locating which directory is growing so f

Making excuses

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:35:57 GMT
So, I've been quiet for how long? Over two weeks, it seems. Would you believe me if I'd say I was busy? Honestly, I was.

1234567890 seconds

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:25:09 GMT
I think the year 2009 should be called "The Year of a Second". First we had a widely celebrated leap second that delayed the begining of this year and now, in couple of hours, we're going to have a nice round numer of 1234567890 seconds since UNIX epoch time January 1, 1970. $ date -ur 123456789
FreeBSD X.org upgrade issues Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:10:55 GMT In my previous post I have mentioned problems that recent update of xorg-server port introduced, wrecking havoc among FreeBSD desktop users. For some hardware/system configurations--like mine--it was a non-issue actually while other faced a major problem. So, if you're struggling with this update ri What might be ZFS good for anyways? Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:44:16 GMT How ZFS could help you with painful software updates. Troubleshooting SMTP AUTH Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:54:24 GMT Sorry for being quiet for so long, but the past week was a really strange one. Nonetheless, I'm back with yet another SMTP post for you. Microsoft offer for computer illiterates Sat, 24 Jan 2009 05:02:38 GMT I've just learned about this absolutely fantastical and thankfully short interview with Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK, from Ovid's journal. Bcfg2 propaganda Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:33:54 GMT Two days ago Mathieu Jobin had sent a message to bcfg-dev mailing list containing a link to Yahoo!'s grid white paper mentioning Bcfg2. As I don't think Bcfg2 is getting as much attention as it should, I thought about mentioning it here. When someone is therek.net. I have a Google Alert set up to send me info on the latest Google search results for the word therek. Yesterday, I received a Google Alert with two links to FreeBSD mailing lists--you see, I'm not active on any of them currently, though previously I was. The links pointed to TCP/IP networking model. Sooner or later it becomes useful for troubleshooting problems with your servers and--in contrary to common believe held by all Windows SysAdmin I've met so far--is not a UNIX specific thing. I'm not going to discuss here the whole process of troubleshooting mail servers. Inste Alleviating NFS experience Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:53:08 GMT I do most of my work on a laptop running FreeBSD. I use it at home, I have it with me when I'm working at a colocation or paying visit to my parents. But it's only a laptop with the 80GB hard drive--which is more than enough as long as you don't want to store your ISO images, backups, or God knows what else on it. So, the data I don't use too frequently I keep on other machines with NFS