Just shut down the old server, chavez, that was running FreeBSD 6.1 - an awesome server. I’ve switched to Debian, and I’m really loving it, having used it in the past I really never dug into it as a server until recently. Administration is just easier, and it’s in line with me trying to cut [...]

Oh yeah, I’m going to Defcon again this year, just found out this Friday for sure. It’s August 3rd - 5th, in Las Vegas, and this year it’s all paid for by my new consulting group; what a great thing. I argued that I would learn so much more there than any class, [...]

One of my favorite things about being a Linux admin is the ability to specify how things are going to be executed on the servers. I’ve been running the Apache web server for over 10 years now (1997), so setting up a new environment is no big deal, but I wanted to take it farther [...]

When you’re running a ton of termial windows or tabs, it helps to have the title of the box name, along with some environment values, easily available to keep you orientated. Here’s a quick script I created to do this automatically when called via your .profile file in your home directory.
#!/bin/bash
HOST_NAME=`hostname -f`
if [ `id -u` [...]

Recently I had an issue at work; while trying to transfer files between Unix hosts we were unable to hit the known scp port, but we could still hit the ssh port. All of this was occurring from home, late at night on a Saturday where I was the main technical point man to move/install [...]

Yesterday NewsForge had an excellent article called, “A look at the FreeNAS server“. Basically FreeNAS is a small operating system based on FreeBSD 6 that provides NAS, or network-attached storage, (Wikipedia page) services like NFS (Network File System), CIFS (Microsoft’s Common Internet File System aka Samba) as well as tried and true Unix utilities like [...]

This may only apply to those of us geeks that use vim to admin servers daily, but today I needed a way to backup, and automate the creation of backup and tmp directories to house those ever annoying ~ and .swp files from showing up in my working directory ($PWD). I didn’t want to [...]

Well, to make a long story short, we’re back. Installed a fresh version of FreeBSD 6.1 on my old(er) server that I built a few years back, and it’s humming along nicely. Going to try and make things simpler here, add a little more focus and less razzle dazzle - which seems to [...]

Having the ability to do passwordless ssh logins helps in so many ways when automating tasks via scripts in Unix/Linux/BSD. Thankfully the great OpenSSH can take care of that for you, allowing you to do ssh, scp, sftp from and to multiple hosts. I always have to look up how to do [...]

Are you like me, do you like to roll with the changes? Well I have, as you can see, with a move to Wordpress from the cool, but unstable Typo. My Typo experience was a blast, but honestly I just don’t have the time to babysit a webapp running on my server (which [...]

Today I learned about memcached, which I’d heard of before, but never really investigated. From the project’s site, ”memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.” So, even though I don’t have a huge amount of traffic, [...]

UPDATE: if you’re using xterm in place of gnome-terminal due to speed, you aren’t any longer. The 2.14 version of Gnome sports a much faster gnome-terminal; it beats xterm for display by allot, and log startup is 20x faster than before! Wow, they did some work on tuning there!
Ok, this is a cheap [...]

UPDATE3: The FreeBSD port is keeping up with this project very well, the current one is only 5 days old! I highly recommend going this route unless you’re a developer or someone who likes to get the bugs before anyone else! Thanks to Bernard for bringing this up.
UPDATE2: Roundcube now uses SVN (Subversion) for [...]

I’ve been pretty quiet about Hula since I’ve been unable to successfully build *and* run it since r370 (currently Hula is at r609). While I’ve solved and committed all the autogen build issues on FreeBSD, it still won’t run; the controlling hulamanager process just hangs, with no errors or output to help out. On the [...]