Saw an interesting post over at Planet Sysadmin regarding a fire & water proof external hard drive by ioSafe – http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=1719. Rated up to 1,550 F for 30 minutes and starting only at $150 for the 500 GB model sounds very tempting in my book.
Mar
16
New Ktux release. Code is now somewhat more organized and committed into a Subversion repository. Preparing to replace paging code with cleaner and more versatile implementation – this will allow for user-level (x86 ring 3) support. I’ve also started to twit now about Ktux, Linux, and all things science. Follow me here if you like!
Jan
6
Simple question that was on my mind for some time – what is RedHat/Fedora’s chkconfig equivalent? sysv-rc-conf is the answer. Not installed by default, simple apt-get solves that. Syntax is almost identical to what I remember. However also keep in mind that runlevels are not necessarily the same across different distributions. If my memory serves me correctly, runlevels 1 and 6 are the only that are guaranteed to be identical on all platforms, although 3 and 5 are usually multi-user mode without and with X respectively. Hope this may help a few of you!
Dec
17
So I was wondering why I could not turn on syntax highlighting in vim. It returned an error “the command is not available in this version”. Apparently Ubuntu comes with a gimped vi or something and I didn’t even realize I did not have vim proper installed. apt-get install vim solved the problem. Whoops 
Dec
17
So I figured out the reason why the secondary drive in my server would spin back up shortly after stopping it. As I was looking through my dmesg log I noticed an entry where it was enabling the swap space on sdb. Whoops, forgot about that. On the other hand, I also noticed that my SMART monitoring configuration works just fine, as briefly after I successfully spun down the drive I received an “SMART failure” email – it could not detect the drive and perform the self-diagnostic. I have configured my systems to forward the local root email to my personal domain, then to my Blackberry with urgent notification. Glad to see it worked this time!