Yesterday I decided that it’s about time to learn Puppet. I’ve had my eye on both Puppet and Chef for some time now. Yesterday after reading this Quora-thread and this blog-post, I decided to go with Puppet. After downloading their test-VM and going through the tutorial, I pretty quickly fell in love with the simplicity and structure. Puppet is straight …
It’s always fun when magazines ask you for your advise. In the December-issue of Computerworld, I was interviewed by Bob Scheier in the cover story and talked about how to create a successful and scalable cloud architecture.
If you’ve ever tried to install ImageMagick on FreeBSD, you’ve probably run into this issue too. You have a head-less box in some datacenter, you don’t want to bloat the machine with X11. You try to install the no-X11-version of Image Magick: cd /usr/ports/graphics/ImageMagick-nox11 && make install The next thing you know, you the dependency …
In the past few years, virtualization has been the big topic everybody keeps talking about. There are good reasons for that, but one thing that really annoys me as a hardcore FreeBSD-fan is how poorly FreeBSD performs virtualized. For some time, the Linux-community have been using the Virtio-drivers to boost both I/O and network performance. Simply put, …
Last weekend I was staying at a Holiday Inn in the UK. As most geeks, one of the first thing I did after checking in was to hop on the wireless connection to pull down my email. Like many hotels, Holiday Inn outsource the management of their wireless guest network. This particular hotel was using a provider named Swisscom (I’m not sure if this true for all …
Is it possible that Facebook know more about how many visitors a given website has than Alexa or Hitwise? I’m not talking about people sharing a link on Facebook and then tracking outbound clicks. I’m talking about capturing all visitors. Both Alexa and Hitwise used to both rely on browser-addons to capture this data. Since only a small percentage of users …
One of my favorite Open Source appliances is pfSense. It can turn any old machine into a very powerful firewall/router in 10 minutes or less. Also, it comes with a very handy GUI and the fact that it is based on FreeBSD makes it even greater. While version 2.0 isn’t stable yet, the 2.0RC is more or less considered stable. It’s also a major update to the …
Today as I was installing PostgreSQL 9.04 on a new server I encountered the following error: \[root@host ~\]# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/postgresql initdb su: unknown login: %%PG_USER%% Something obviously went wrong when the port was being installed. Most likely it’s a bug in the build-instructions for the port. No stress though, as there is an easy fix. Just open …
The most exciting new feature in OS X Lion for all paranoid techies out there was the introduction of full-disk encryption (FileVault 2). The previous version of FileVault only enabled you to encrypt your home directory. That was a good start, but it forced you to log out once in a while to recover disk space. This was extra painful if you were using a small …
If you ran one of the beta releases of Mac OS X Lion, you probably ran into a problem when trying to upgrade to the final release of OS X Lion. When I tried to upgrade one of my dev-machines, I was prompted with an error saying “A newer version of this app is already installed on this computer” Of course, you know that isn’t the case, as OS X Lion, just came …