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Is Carbon Copy Cloner better than Time Machine?

When Apple announced Time Machine, I was overwhelmed and thought it was the best invention since sliced bread. I’ve been using it since then in setups both with a dedicated external hard drive and a Network Attached Storage (NAS). Lately though, I’ve started to get more and more annoyed with Time Machine. It consumes a significant amount of resources, as it …

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How to merge PDF-files on Mac OS X

In my previous post, I talked about how to split PDF files on Mac OS X, Linux and Unix. In that article, I mentioned a simple app that allows you to merge several PDF files. The app is dead simple, and you can create it for yourself if you’d like (here’s the workflow in Automator). All it asks you for is the input files (the files you want to merge), and it …

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How to manage VMware Server on Mac OS X with VNC

VMware Server is a great product. It’s free and works well with most guest operating systems. However, there is one major drawback – you cannot use the ‘console’ app on Mac OS X. For some strange reason, VMware decided to only make the required Firefox plug-in available for Linux and Windows. Given that Mac OS X is the OS of choice for most tech-savvy users …

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How to split a PDF files on Mac, Linux or Unix

There are a ton of tools out there for modifying PDF-files. Most of them are crappy, overpriced sharewares from mediocre developers looking to make cash from non-technical users. What most Mac-users perhaps do not know is that Mac OS comes with a ton of handy tools for modifying PDF files. For instance, with a few clicks, you can create an app that merges …

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Moving Cyrus from a 32Bit to a 64Bit server

I’ve you’ve read the past few articles I’ve published, you’ve probably figured out two things: I love FreeBSD. I’m in the process of moving a bunch of servers. This time I’ll walk you trough how to move Cyrus-IMAP between a 32bit server to a 64bit server. In my case, on FreeBSD. Unfortunately the process is not as straight-forward as I imagined it to be. …

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Copying users/groups between two FreeBSD servers

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 …

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Annoying SEO scam

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 …

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Setting up a redundant NAS with HAST and CARP

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 …

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How to build Apache and mod_wsgi with Python 2.7 on FreeBSD

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 …

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How to get RabbitMQ 1.8 to work on FreeBSD

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 …

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