Anthony’s Blog

Overall I am fairly impressed with Intrepid.  They seemed to have fixed a number of bugs I encountered (especially that annoying menu pulldown delay with dual screen configurations), and I’ve actually switched back to full compiz mode.  Most things work fairly smoothly and performance seems a bit better as well.  There is one strange bug I’ve found where there is a vertical black bar on the right-hand side of my 2nd monitor, which cuts off the gnome-panel at the top of my screen.  What doesn’t make much sense to me is that maximized windows do not extend over into the dark limbo, unlike the panel:

Odd desktop/resolution bug

Strange.  Maybe it didn’t auto-detect my old 2005FPW right, pretty sure I had a manually configured xorg.conf just prior to the upgrade  I’ll have to look into it further.

Regardless, now it comes time to design/implement more items that have been held back too long.  Firstly will entail setting up a basic SSH key repository for my various machines and accounts.  There are a number of good articles about this topic.  What I find particularly useful are the ‘from’ and ‘command’ options within OpenSSH (referenced in the last two URL’s).  I have been wondering about a solution to this for some time; I wanted to create passphrase-less SSH keys used for automation & scripting but did not want full access to anyone who may have compromised the keys.  This solution seems like it will fit perfectly!  Already have a few sample ideas to use this with.

After setting up SSH keys, next will come full NIS implementation.  I already have it installed on my server, but not configured or running at the current time.  NFS-mounted home directories always seem like a good option, and I would normally agree but I am not sure if I want the usability of my desktop system tied dependent upon the server being up and running.  Right now if the server goes down, I can still function fine on my desktop – just without access to my RAID storage array.  Also due to come will be a post on performance logging & monitoring, I love my GkrellM but something with metrics storage would be nice.