JDPFu.com 2010

The Best Linux Commercial that You've Never Seen

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:01:00 -0400

The Best Linux Commercial that you’ve never seen.

Parts of it are clearly written by the marketing team, since it isn’t really 100% true and the performance displayed seems to be sped up 20%, but still it is a nice, slick looking commercial.

I wish they’d said – 30,000+ applications, instead of thousands of applications and pointing out that updates to all of them are handled centrally OR automatically, if you prefer. Synaptic for 10.04 shows over 30,000 packages now. Still, it is a very good view of what Linux and Ubuntu can accomplish today.

Dell needs to get some balls in their dealings with Microsoft.

Some more Linux commercials

Original article writen by John and published on JDPFu.com 2010 | direct link to this article | If you are reading this article elsewhere than JDPFu.com 2010, it has been illegally reproduced and without proper authorization.

Centralized vs Federated Computer Services

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:25:00 -0400

I came across a short article on the Free Software Foundation building a federated social network solution and figured a few of my readers would be interested.

Help - Dealing with Abusive Aggregators

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:00:00 -0400

How do you deal with abusive web aggregators?

You know, those automatic programs that search out and grab web content so that others can see it? Usually, this is a good thing for a web site, since it makes your content visible to others that wouldn’t normally see it. That is, until it becomes abusive.

Skype + Asterisk for Home Phone Service

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:30:00 -0400

I’ve been interested in saving some money on home phone service since around 2001 when I dropped the babybell service for a VoIP solution. Over the years, I’ve switched providers and ended up with the cable company phone service to get the best quality for the buck. Now they’ve raised the prices and I’m looking again. I’m not interested in Vonage at $25/month when a $3/month plan will cover me. Further, I already own the necessary equipment to get this all working. You may already own the equipment too.

It always seemed that a $3/month SkypeOut account could be linked to a PBX (Asterisk/FOSS) to make this happen. A few months ago, I asked about this on Lifehacker, but didn’t get any acceptable answers.

How to Ask a Smart Question

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:16:00 -0400

How to Ask a Smart Question.

After reading a 2 pg rant from a new Linux user complaining that his questions were not being answered, I did a little googling and found a post on how to ask a smart question. I added a link here mainly so I could review it later, when I needed to ask a smart question.

Trilead VM Explorer Install Tips

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:04:00 -0400

As some of you may know, I am a consultant, primarily with UNIX, virtualization and systems architecture. The last few days, I’ve been setting up a fairly low cost backup solution for a 100% MS-Windows shop running VMWare ESX 3.×. They have 15+ VMs and the old backup system had been shutdown and wiped more than a few months ago. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the prior backup solution except that the day-to-day system users didn’t know much about the setup. My task was to get that system working again.

The Tools

Trilead VM Explorer – the VMware compatible VMDK backup software. Not the free version.
Fire Daemon Pro – to run the backup task on a schedule.
MS-Batch – .CMD files – to selectively control which VMs are backed up on specific days without point-and-click requirements.
Service Accounts – this is very important in the MS-Windows world.

Minimalistic Linux - TinyCore

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:48:00 -0400

If you are looking for the smallest Linux possible and want to add just a few applications, then you really need to look at TinyCore.

11MB of disk, 64MB of RAM (perhaps less), 2.6.xx kernel, X11 or not, your choice. What more do you need to know?

Small Footprint in Disk AND Memory – 11MB

Do you have 11MB of Disk and 64MB of RAM? TinyCore Linux will work for you.

Why Are You Still Using Adobe Tools?

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Adobe has been plagued with security issues in their most popular tool, like Acrobat and Reader. These issues seem to be on all platforms, but are mostly targeted by hackers on MS-Windows. For years, we’ve known that Acrobat allowed PDF documents more access than most people need by default – JavaScript and the ability to start other programs running on the system. 99% of Acrobat Reader users do not need or want either of those features, yet, they are enabled by default.

Adobe has been slow to correct issues and claimed to be on a quarterly patch cycle. This is for Flash, Shockwave, Reader and all products including PhotoShop. For almost all of these tools, there are alternatives that are not the main targets of hackers.

So, I gotta ask …

Why are you still using Adobe Tools?

8 Techniques For Getting Help with Linux

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 12:00:00 -0400

How to ask for help for Linux issues.

All of us need a little help now and again. Linux users aren’t any different than MS-Windows or Mac users in that regard. The difference is that to get help for Linux, you need to do a little more research first.

We’ll assume you don’t have a nearby Linux knowledgeable friend that knows everything. You’ll need to ask people you do not know for help. Or, perhaps you are the Linux guru in your circle of friends and your questions are more complex than most.

Below, I’ll suggest a few methods to use to get help and outline the data you should include in your requests to optimize the ability of others to actually be helpful to you.

Make Windows Almost 50% Faster Under VirtualBox

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:45:00 -0400

I’ve been slightly disappointed with overall VirtualBox performance and decided to see what I could do to make things faster. For me, there are 3 elements to the performance issue. CPU, Disk and Network I/O. At this point, I only have possible solutions for two of the three areas.

My server is running Ubuntu Server x64 10.04 with VirtualBox 3.1.6 OSE directly from the Ubuntu repository. Below, I’ll describe how to improve both disk and network I/O performance. I think these suggestions will apply to other versions and MS-Windows hosts too.

Editing GUI Settings in Linux or UNIX

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 17:00:00 -0400

Today a friend sent an email with a Gnome helper app to setup a panel so remote ssh logins could be added to the Gnome Panel. There are lots of applications, or applets, like this out there. They all read and edit config files and provide a GUI to do something that has been possible for years and years. I guess if you are new, then having a program that edits configuration files before you’ve learned to use a UNIX editor is a good thing. Noob-friendly editing is good and reduces the perceived learning curve for Linux. Long-time users know that having a program to edit simple configuration files isn’t needed. You can edit them yourself and accomplish amazing things.

Some background reading on X/Windows. Here’s an architecture image as a reminder:

Recall that the X-Server runs on the desktop and that the X-client runs on the other, sometimes remote, machine sending requests for to the specific screen to be displayed. Also, you can run many X-servers on a single machine, even if they are not physically displayed.

Nothing is New

Do a google search on “fvwm screenshots” to see what I mean. This one or one very similar has been displayed as long as I can recall using fvwm. fvwm has been around since before I started using UNIX/Linux in 1993. I didn’t find it until 1995 when it was a pioneer in virtual desktop capable window managers. At that time, people were still using wmw and twm, yes, people actually used twm. When you first started using FVWM, you wanted to configure the menu for your local needs. It was easy to get going quick and setup remote logins to other systems for everything, including telnet, ssh, email, web browsing, editing files, running desktop word processors … whatever. Today the GUI settings are still maintained inside text files and these can be customized manually. Sometimes there are a few more steps since GUI programmers today like to take a simple concept and turn it into an environment that requires many, many more config files. Still, manually adding menu items to a panel for Gnome, KDE, XFCE, or LXDE is relatively easy.

Faster Linux Software RAID Rebuilds

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:55:00 -0400

This Cyberciti.biz article explains settings and techniques to increase the default RAID re-build performance from 4k to 51k in his example. The key settings were

Increase the speed limit max by adding dev.raid.speed_limit_max = 500000 to /etc/sysctl.conf
Enable bitmaps during the rebuild and disable them after
1. sudo mdadm —grow —bitmap=internal /dev/md0
2. sudo mdadm —grow —bitmap=none /dev/md0

Wireless Network Bridging with Security in a Home or Small Business

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0400

Sometimes a home or small business would like to extend a network without running any ethernet cables or using expensive power line methods. Many homes have an old WiFi router that is still working, but the new router still doesn’t get signal to all parts of the home or some devices do not support WiFi networking, only 100base-tx wired. By using the new WiFi router with the older WiFi router, it is possible to extend a network over WiFi and locate wired connections on the far side of the home using just the two wifi routers in bridge mode.

Plumbing Disaster Takes Out Dallas County, Tx Systems

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Your computer guys are always talking about some coming disaster and trying to get budget for a DR, Disaster Recovery failover location. There never seems to be enough funds. Heck, you may be lucky to get backups rotated to an offsite location.

A story in Dallas Morning News, Water-main break cripples Dallas County computers, operations explains what happened to take down the county computer systems.

5 Cron Scheduler Tips for Linux/UNIX

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 15:22:00 -0400

Cron has been around since the beginning of UNIX systems. It is a scheduler that will run programs or scripts periodically when scheduled. The scheduling can be for a specific time annually or at the same minute every hour or any period between those. The hardest part for me is recalling the specific format of the crontab. It is very specific and any mistake will

Different effective user accounts use different crontab files, so you can run periodic jobs as yourself or some other account like root. More crontab info .

Ok, finally, on to the tips.

WiFi Security Checklist

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 09:01:00 -0400

In the last few days, a permanent article here about a WiFi Router Security Checklist has gotten a very large number of hits, over 100x the normal page views. It contains 15 or so suggestions that every home or small business wifi router user should do from a security point of view.

VirtualBox Locked Up My Ubuntu Server x64 System

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:31:00 -0400

When you see these messages, what does that mean to you?

Different View of Space Shuttle Costs

Wed, 26 May 2010 11:27:00 -0400

In a BBC article about the Space Shuttle Atlantis landing the author mentioned a few statistics.

A Few Statistics

*First flight: 3 October 1985
*Total number of flights: 32
*Distance traveled: 195 million km
*Total number of days in orbit: 294
*Total number of orbits: 4,648

Cost Estimates

So if we assume that each shuttle launch and mission costs NASA about $450M on average, that leads to a few other operational cost numbers.

$14,400M for 32 flights
$48.98M for each day in orbit
$3.1M for each orbit

These are just the costs for Atlantis while on mission. These numbers make my next vacation plans seem tiny. ;)

Disclosure: I was employed by the space shuttle program for 5 yrs and by both the shuttle and space station programs for 3 years. I worked at NASA-JSC in Houston, Tx for both of those jobs.

Out of Date Browser Plugin Checker

Wed, 26 May 2010 08:45:00 -0400

We all know to keep our systems patched, but that isn’t always easy. Mozilla has come up with an easy way for everyone to check their browser for out of date plugins. This applies to Firefox browsers, but it also works for EI, Safari, Opera and perhaps other browsers.
So, open a new browser tab and go check your plugins http://www.mozilla.com/plugincheck/ now.

Ubuntu 10.04 - Lucid - Lockup

Tue, 25 May 2010 21:17:00 -0400

Lucid locked up on me today. The external disk array was really busy running multiple transcoding jobs at the time – love the quad core CPUs!. Those jobs filled up /raid, not any important file systems and locked up X/Windows. HOME is on a different FS too, BTW.