A slightly better Xen console

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I love the ability to console in to a paravirtualized domain, especially when making changes to firewall rules. What I do not like is what the redirect does to the terminal when using stuff that heavily depends on ncurses, like ‘top’ or the midnight commander. If your not familiar with minicom, its a simple ‘telex [...]

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Why I don’t spend money on IT certifications

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Some reports that were recently published talked about GNU/Linux professionals without certifications making more money with less turn over than professionals with certifications. I have never felt the need to waste my money on Linux certifications, for serveral reasons: I actively contribute to many free / open source software projects as well as GNU/Linux distributions. [...]

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Yet another virtual appliance

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In my on-going effort to make the building blocks for a “poor man’s” cluster, I’ve decided to get to work on some virtual appliance images suitable for use with Xen (and possibly others). Pound is a great load balancing tool. Its light weight, super easy to configure and pretty reliable. Depending on the kind of [...]

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My backup enchilada

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In all honesty, this is just a recipe for my enchilada, I’m still in the prep and planning stage. My goal: Make a really efficient idiot-proof backup program that (could) use the the features of an ext3cow file system if one happened to be present. I don’t spare a penny when it comes to computers [...]

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/etc well tamed with Mercurial + ext3cow

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Needing to fix something because someone else fixed something is just a part of being a system administrator. For years, I have tried various methods of controlling /etc to combat brain dead programs that modify things in /etc, as well as mindless admins who believe everything that some tutorial found via some search engine tells [...]

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The Roadsend PHP compiler

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I have a new toy, the Roadsend PHP compiler. I really, really like my new toy Roadsend does something neat, they take Zend PHP completely out of the picture. Roadsend comes with its own PHP library, which is released under the GNU LGPL2 license. This allows you to license your stuff (basically) any way that [...]

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Reliable, Available Or Highly Available?

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I’ll probably get a bunch of hate mail over this one, but that’s nothing new Many people seem to be confused when I use the word reliable when talking about a cluster of computers, they seem to be used to the word available. In particular, they seem used to the phrase highly available. Aren’t clusters [...]

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Web hosts – use jfs over ext3

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This is a quick note Web hosts, try jfs over ext3. I can now report, over a year and counting, every time I clean up a disaster, computers ( virtual or dedicated ) using JFS nearly _always_ recover. Those using ext3 typically suffer database corruption, /etc is missing or corrupted, or some other problem that [...]

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