Linux

I was shocked to see Robyn Bergeron’s email today about Seth Vidal’s passing.

Pairing virt-manager with KVM makes booting new VM’s pretty darned easy.

Most of my websites run on a pair of Supermicro servers that I purchased from Silicon Mechanics (and I can’t say enough good things about them and their servers).

It’s been a little while since I last posted about installing Xen on Fedora, so I figured that Fedora 19’s beta release was as good a time as any to write a new post.

I’ve converted one of my KVM hypervisors from CentOS 6 to Fedora 18 and now comes the task of migrating my virtual machines off of my single remaining CentOS 6 hypervisor.

This post is a quick one but I wanted to share it since I taught it to someone new today.

Changing my ssh port from the default port (22) has been one of my standard processes for quite some time when I build new servers or virtual machines.

Although the X1 Carbon has a much better looking display than the T430s, it still looked a bit washed out when I compared it to other monitors right next to it.

UPDATE: I’ve found a better configuration via another X1 Carbon user and there’s a new post with all the details.

Ever since I saw QuickSilver for the first time, I’ve been hooked on quick application launchers.

This post covers the second half of my experience moving back to a Linux desktop but I figured it was a good opportunity to focus on the ThinkPad T430s itself as well as the Lenovo ordering experience.

Although I’ve been exclusively using a Mac for everything but servers since about 2008, I found myself considering a move back to Linux on the desktop after seeing how some people were using it at LinuxCon.

After getting Android-envy at LinuxCon, I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone and ditch my iPhone 4 for a Samsung Galaxy S III.

LVM snapshots can be really handy when you’re trying to take a backup of a running virtual machine.

This problem came up in conversation earlier this week and I realized that I’d never written a post about it.

Anyone who has been a system administrator for even a short length of time has probably used traceroute at least once.

Kristóf Kovács has a fantastic post about some lesser-known Linux tools that can really come in handy in different situations.

A fellow Racker showed me httpry about five years ago and I’ve had in my toolbox as a handy way to watch HTTP traffic.

I originally wrote this post for the Rackspace Blog but I’ve posted it here just in case anyone following my blog’s feed finds it useful.

The grades came back last Friday and I’ve passed the last exam in the requirements to become a Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA).

I’ll be the first one to admit that Kerberos drives me a little insane.

Although Citrix recommends against using software RAID with XenServer due to performance issues, I’ve had some pretty awful experiences with hardware RAID cards over the last few years.

XenServer 6 is a solid virtualization platform, but the installer doesn’t give you many options for customized configurations.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Routerboard devices and the RouterOS software from Mikrotik that runs on them.

Anyone who has used a 3G ExpressCard or USB stick knows how handy they can be when you need internet access away from home (and away from Wi-Fi).

Before we get started, I really ought to drop this here:

I’m using SELinux more often now on my Fedora 15 installations and I came up against a peculiar issue today on a new server.

My daily work involves working with a large number of servers and one of my frustrations with Firefox is that it’s not possible to select an entire IP address with a double click with the default settings.

If you haven’t noticed already, full Xen dom0 support was added in the Linux 3.

Some might call me paranoid, but I get nervous when my package manager automatically removes a kernel.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the RouterBoard network devices paired with Mikrotik’s RouterOS.

There are few things which will rattle systems administrators more than a compromised server.

As promised in one of my previous posts about dual-primary DRBD and OCFS2, I’ve compiled a step-by-step guide for Fedora.

FUDCon 2011 in Tempe hasn’t even fully started yet, but it’s been well worth the trip already.

After reading the title of this post, you might wonder “Why would someone pay for a Mac Mini and then not use OS X with it?

My daily work requires me to work with a lot of customer data and much of it involves IP address allocations.

Diagram: OpenVPN to Rackspace Cloud Servers and Slicehost

One of the most common questions that I see in my favorite IRC channel is: “How can I secure sshd on my server?

Installing Xen can be a bit of a challenge for a beginner and it’s made especially difficult by distribution vendors who aren’t eager to include it in their current releases.

I’ve been getting requests for GlusterFS benchmarks from every direction lately and I’ve been a bit slow on getting them done.

As many of you might have noticed from my previous GlusterFS blog post and my various tweets, I’ve been working with GlusterFS in production for my personal hosting needs for just over a month.

Typical configuration for a proxy-type load balancer

The discussions about the paravirt_ops, or “pvops”, support in upstream kernels at Xen Summit 2010 last month really piqued my interest.

When you need to measure network throughput and capacity, I haven’t found a simpler solution than iperf.

One of my favorite (and most used) applications on any Linux machine is screen.

Happy New Year!

I usually set the time zone on my servers to UTC, but that makes it a bit confusing for me when I use irssi.

Mac users feel a little left out when it comes to VMWare Server clients.

Setting up new servers can be a pain if you’re not able to clone them from a server that is known to be working.

I’ve tested this Debian etch to lenny upgrade process a few times so far, and it seems to be working well.