Somewhere out there!

Instruction by Jorrit Waalboer for Installing Debian on a RAID 1 pair.

Nice clean method, seems to work without having to resort to a initrd image. Not sure sure about the use of swap on a RAID 1 device, although I guess it makes re-configuration very easy.

The IMMS author also has this application: FunFS, a secure replacement for NFS:

The primary design goals of FunFS are reliability, security and performance. To achive these goals, FunFS uses an unconventional approach to network filesystems: it moves the majority of the filesystem implementation to userspace.

DRBL is a fat-client method for Linux. In contrast to the thin client method of LTSP.

Will have to investigate how their scripts work.

Discovered QEMU today.

After a quick apt-get install qemu I was able to run a quick test successfully:

nic@thunder:/vol/nfs/lode/other/bsd/openbsd/3.4$ qemu-fast -fda floppy34.fs


At the moment, I’m running my openbsd dev machine on an old Tecra 8100 (P3-600) laptop. I use this to compile sources for my flashboot based routers. Qemu both seems like a easier mechanism than boches to test these images, plus a method to retire that laptop to some other use and centralise the openbsd dev work to another machine. I’ve tried this previously on vmware, but it was never reliable. make world would always throw sig-11 faults.

Supposedly Qemu (non fast version) has about an 8 time slow down. My dual 2.4Ghz Xeon would be perfect.

The ideal I searching for though is not quite there. I’d love to be able to run openbsd and linux side by side on my colo machine. Let openbsd/pf+altq deal with the firewall and traffic management, and have linux provide the application server. I was hoping that Xen might do this job, but I don’t think quite there yet.

I’ll have to do some testing with the bsdjail patch. Seems like a good lightweight mechanism which is more powerful than chroot.

xargs is one of things that every unix admin should have in their tool box. Here is a nice discussion of its various uses.

Unix Review: v12, i06: Using the xargs Command

New kdm (3.3) in unstable fails source /etc/X11/Xsession and thus ssh-agent. Here’s the bug report with a work around:
Debian Bug report logs – #265865 – kdm doesn’t use common modular Xsession from xfree86-common.

Don’t you hate it when you have to download a 50Mb openoffice.org deb, just because the developer has changed one line in debian/*. I think someone some work on a binary patch system not just for security releases but for all updates.

Work on the principle subversion uses. DIskspace is cheap and bandwidth is expensive.

While we are at it the other thing Debian needs is mastermerge.

Planning to move to a centralised logging system using a database. Mainly so I can keep log entries around for at least 6 months, plus to make it easier to find and sort entries with one of the php based log-display systems.

Couple of methods avaliable that look interesting: Syslog Logging with PostgreSQL HOWTO and Centralized syslog-ng to Mysql.

Will have to investigate further.

Using kprinter directly would often bring on a whole pile of warning messages like “kdecore (KIconLoader): WARNING: Icon directory /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ group 48×48/stock/media not valid” for empty directories. Annoying to say the least.

Final forced myself google for a solution. I must say the KDE has some real nice flexibilities in configuration.