Nix Bits

I’ve started a new job recently and with it came a new, very nice, laptop. And of course my whole “workflow” is changing so that’s pushed me to look at some new tools for doing my job. I like to tinker with new tools and utilities from time to time. tmux First up is tmux. […]

I recently installed Linux Mint (ubuntu with some goodies) on a laptop and wanted an encrypted whole disk. In order for this to be truly secure, you need encrypted swap. Well most of the HOWTOs for encrypting swap use a randomized key. This breaks hibernate to disk for laptops because the linux kernel has no […]

Oh Man, These past two weeks since getting back from Vegas have been brtual. I’ve had patches blow up in my face (partly because Solaris patching is still so 1995). I had a storage crunch on my NetWorker index store force me to borrow some space and mount it over NFS. Which worked great. Until […]

This interesting article talks about the kernel.org infrastructure used to maintain the Linux kernel. Overall it’s a fascinating little bit of history. It’s also intriguing because it gives an example of running an extremely bandwidth and processor intensive site. This quote is especially interesting regarding an earlier verision of kernel.org hosted on a dual PIII. […]

The new Knoppix 3.8 has added an interesting feature by incorporating UnionFS into the filesystem. What does this mean? Well it means I can modify a file in /etc without a problem. The underlying unionfs structure writes the mod to /ramdisk and the change is transparent. In fact, any change can be made. Software can […]

This is one of those articles I’m just preserving for my own future reference.

I found this article on installing Debian From Scratch fairly intresting. Lately I’ve been installing mepis as a Debian install for others. But for myself, I need something a bit more hands-on. The Debian install I have at home is getting really stale now so I am actually considering a re-install. Lots of folks think […]

Joey Hess wrote an article sometime back on how he maintains his entire home directory in cvs. He has updated it now to use subversion now. I’ve been using svn to maintain some projects myself and I liked Joey’s original concept. The only issues for me is that I sometimes use different profiles for some […]

OpenBSD doesn’t have portupgrade like FreeBSD. Many OpenBSD users just take a snapshot of installed ports/packages by first running pkg_info and then deleting their package database as described in OpenBSD’s upgrade documentation. OpenBSD does offer a script though, to check what ports are out of date: /usr/ports/infrastructure/build/out-of-date. The script seems to work well for my […]

Writing up the procedure I use to stream music got me thinking about problems with it and alternatives. One problem that it has is that I must be logged in on the console, in X, running xmms. A power-outage forced reboot could end my musical bliss at work ;). Someone else pointed out that I […]