Zen of Linux

Varnish is a high speed caching daemon or HTTP accelerator. I recently learned some lessons while implementing it on a host. I’d like to share here some bits of information which might be useful to others struggling with their install.
Config file locations
If you’ve installed varnish via apt-get install varnish, on Debian 5.0 the config file […]

In order to upgrade a running server via ssh from Debian Etch 4.0 to Lenny 5.0 I basically followed these steps here and had a perfect result.
Change every line in /etc/apt/sources.list having “etch” to “lenny”, then:
> aptitude update
Once this is done we will want to upgrade first the core apt packages
> aptitude install apt dpkg […]

In some cases it might be wise to spin down a hdd in order to save power, reduce noise or whatever.
Most people will tend to let the system manage spin up/down of a hard drive, and mostly this feature is used on portable laptops to save battery energy.
On an always-on desktop machine it is probably […]

SD cards and portable storage is getting increasigly large. So before you dump gigabytes of data onto these chips, it’s a good idea to check if the SD card, SDHC, CF-Card or USB Stick is actually in good shape by thoroughly testing the preformated media.
On Windows, there are some nifty focused utils to do just […]

One of the first things you might do, probably after your PC broke down or the OS got unbootable, is to do a copy/ snapshot of the system hdd drive before you do a clean install of Windows XP, try to repeair the existing one or do something else. In my case the machine in […]

As a privacy concerned person you might walk away from Google as your primary search engine. You just don’t feel comfortable about how they store or keep your searching habits?
You have switched to Linux as you regard it as more stable, more secure and more streamlined than other OSs?
You promote the open-source movement and […]

When you do backups with rdiff-backup, browsing snapshots older than the current one might quite quickly become a cumbersome command-line orgy. There are a number of tools out there to ease the pain with a graphical frontend. The rdiff-backup Wiki neatly lists them here, but you will soon find out that they are cgi based, […]

Not everyone is using *nix OS on their computers. Recently, I had a problem with another machine that was stuck in an endless loop of the login screen, completely preventing a proper startup of the machine.
The story was that the machine got a few hardware problems after transport which lead to DRAM replacement and changes […]

While wanting to use DVD::Rip, Thoggen DVD Ripper and GnomeBaker to copy (or backup) a DVD today, I encountered the strange “Error trying to open: device or resource busy” on my Ubuntu box today.
I solved this by freeing the dvd drive from system access with:
sudo umount /dev/sr0
and everything worked. BTW: I recommend GnomeBaker for easy […]

Live http streaming (specs here) is essentially a number of short video segments (~10 seconds each) and a permanently updated index file (.m3u8) that tells the iPhone where to fetch the next segment. Each segment is x264 video in a mpeg ts container.
You can setup a working streaming chain using ffmpeg as input, a segmenter […]