Linux

I have run the hotel/apartment room server off a BeagleBoard-XM for a few months now. I had no case for it, so I was a little worried to have an exposed computing platform hanging out there while the cleaning team and visitors were around. This put me on a search for a ARM-based platform that was small, silent, and could run Arch Linux. Up till this point I had used the Beagleboard with Ubuntu due to the ease of install. Yes it is capable of running Arch, but it isn’t a seamless process. Additionally, being ARM v7 it was not able to run Plex which is my media streaming platform of choice for the ouya ...

Simulating WAN links used to be a difficult process. I would load FreeBSD with a dummynet driver and play with the settings to tweak where I needed it for the activity. OpenBSD with ALTQ made this a step simpler with the ease of bridging adapters. On a recent project for Spec Ops Technology, I needed to simulate a WAN with latency, loss, and randomness. I decided I needed to dig more into the netem work included in most recent linux distributions. Netem has matured to the point of being a very potent utility for setting up quick testbeds. Additionally with most any modern Linux distro you are online in minutes. I will post a very quick script to get you online: ...

Microsoft Lync is prevalent through the corporate world. Honestly its a pretty decent product on a Windows machine. On Linux and Mac though it is really a half-baked product of varying working status. On Mac the official client burns through your battery due to requiring the Nvidia graphics card on my Retina Pro?? I am a big fan on Pidgin (or Adium on the Mac) and have been struggling to get Lync support working on Mac/Linux using this client. Today I was finally able to connect. ...

I am in the midst of testing some of the latest Linux kernels and realized that my old kernel config was wiped. In my desire to finish the build I forgot to select a VERY important option if you are using dm-crypt and LUKS. If you cannot access your /boot then there is no way to upgrade your kernel. Chicken and egg issue. Another issue maybe that you lost your /dev/sda1 or other nodes due to udev overtaking. Here is the fix in the situation: ...

I would argue it is pretty sad that the tools needed to abstract the OS from hardware are tied to specific platforms. Companies that pride themselves on delivering “cloud services” without the constraints of operating system force us admin types to have machines we wouldn’t otherwise. Take for example my ESXi cluster in the basement. I have a single XP Virtual Machine who’s sole purpose is to admin vSphere. A company with such a rich history of Linux and OSS support drives me crazy at times. (see also PCoIP support from VMware with their Linux/Mac Client) ...