Sometimes you want to move all users and groups from one server to another without having to recreate all users. Let’s say you are retiring an old server and moving to a new server. If you’ve had the server for a while and have lots of users on it, the last thing you want to do is to recreate all users and assign new passwords. If you’re on FreeBSD, the task …
So I’m not 100% confident that this is a scam, but it sure looks like it. I’ve been contacted by this guy a few times by now. Here’s the email he sent out. Also, I’m pretty sure there is no such thing as the “reverse google pagerank algorithm”. Hi, John Stahl here. I just wanted to drop you a line and invite you to be a link partner for our website …
One of the coolest new features in FreeBSD is HAST (Highly Available Storage). In simple terms, it can be described as RAID1 (mirror) over TCP/IP (similar to DRBD on Linux, but native). You can simply have two physical nodes replicate data over the network. If you throw in CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) to the mix, you can create a very robust …
We’re probably not the only company switching to Python 2.7. Right now, we’re in the final phase of rolling out an updated version that uses Python 2.7. As I was setting up our servers, I ran into a few issues with packages who were hardcoded to use Python 2.6 or earlier. Both Chronicle and YippieMove are using Django, and use on Apache with mod_wsgi. When …
Update: Thanks to Phillip (the maintainer of the package), this issue has now been resolved for RabbitMQ 2.0. The instructions below still applies if you for some reason prefer to run RabbitMQ 1.8. This post might be irrelevant as soon as the port maintainer resolves this issue, but as I’m writing this, this bug will prevent you from running RabbitMQ …
Local management tools are critical for most Linux and Unix distributions. For instance, if you delete Python 2.6 from your Ubuntu installation, it becomes more or less unusable. This is because most local management tools are written in Python. I have no problem with this. On the contrary, I think it makes a whole lot of sense to write management tools in a …
While upgrading to Python 2.7 on one of our development servers (FreeBSD 7.2), I ran across a somewhat strange error with Django (or rather mod_wsgi). Since I didn’t find a whole lot useful results when I Googled for it, I decided to do a brief write-up about it. The error I received was as follows: \[Errno 13\] Permission denied: ‘/nonexistent’ As it turns …
My experience with VMware goes way back. I think the first version I ever used was VMware Workstation 4.0 back in ’03. That’s seven years ago. Back then it was really cool as a proof-of-concept, but not very useful as the hardware didn’t have enough power (primarily RAM) to run multiple OS’es simultaneously (or, at least my hardware). A few years ago I …
I watched a really interesting TED-talk last night that I wanted to share with all of you. It’s on the topic of human irrationality and how it is mirrored in monkeys. The verdict is that monkeys make the same irrational decisions as humans make, despite the fact that we know they’re irrational decisions. Here’s the video:
I will rant a bit about how pathetic the U.S. banks are, so if you don’t want to read about that, jump down to ‘End Rant.’ Rant Banks in the US are kind of like the movie industry. They realize that their golden days are over, and will therefor try to squeeze every penny out of you. The two industries are also in denial about the fact that the entire world …
Recently I had to set up an intranet search engine to crawl trough thousands of PDF files. There are a ton of commercial solutions (read: $$$$ ) out there on the market, ranging from Google Search Appliance to IBM’s OmniFind. There are also a few good Open Source engines, such as Apache’s Lucene. The problem is that these are primarily intended for …
This idea hit me this morning. Assuming you have a decent connection at home (not ADSL or Cable that is), Amazon S3 (or Jungle Disk) makes a pretty nice back-bone for a home NAS. It is fairly cheap and you will no longer worry about growing out of your array or failing disks. Yes, I reckon that if you store your data without encryption (even in a private …