A simple matter of…

I’ve just setup my server at home with a few VTs logged in as root, just makes troubleshooting a little easier. Details are up at: http://bitcube.co.uk/content/console-auto-login

After a highly entertaining talk by Andy Stanford-Clark, I have finally wired up my CurrentCost meter to the computer. In fact it’s a shiny new [http://www.currentcost.com/product-cc128.html CC128] device which can accept multiple inputs. A short while later and I have made this Nagios plugin so that I can monitor it using Opsview. Graphs in a [...]

Just upgraded my Netgear DG834 (v2) modem with the [http://dgteam.ilbello.com/index.php DGTeam] fireware. This removes the MSN block that the original has (which I could never get rid of other via hacking in and removing it from time to time). Now I don’t need to use the MSN proxy I can also try the Empathy IM [...]

A bit late into the game, I’ve just setup lastfmproxy so that I can listen to it on my Roku Soundbridge. Pretty simple – just install the package, change the username/password, set the bind address to 0.0.0.0 rather than 127.0.0.1 so that other things can talk to it and then point to http://servername:1881/lastfm.m3u. Well, sort [...]

As all geeks know, we have to help others less geeky with their computers. As a Linux geek, this means helping out my parents with their Ubuntu PC. So how do I do this: First step is to tweak their ADSL router to allow me access via ssh. This is very router specific but you [...]

Just added TLS to my mail server and whilst I was at it, SASL AUTH (via dovecot). The latter was very easy, the former was also pretty simple after I read the big document I’m not authenticating clients via TLS – it’s possible, but SASL AUTH is a better solution for me (you don’t need [...]

Never has a source control system been more aptly named. git is amazingly cool and powerful, however it also possesses a steep learning curve. I’m now happily using it in a basic fashion – one central repository, an edge repository on my laptop and desktop. You really do need to spend a bit of time [...]

KVM is coming along nicely. Today’s finding is from virsh: “shutdown gracefully shutdown a domain” Only it doesn’t – it just nukes the VM. How to fix this? First of all you must add this to your VM’s libvirt config: <features> <acpi/> </features> That will not make shutdown work, but it will stop it nuking [...]

Well it’s taken most of the day, but it’s finally done. Dodgy internet connection meant that I couldn’t upgrade as much as I wanted to as early as I wanted to and slowed me down somewhat. I’ve also upgraded everything from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny (partly to make it easier to get the paravirtualised [...]

These last couple of weeks I’ve been setting the new virtualisation infrastructure at work. Xen is dead, long live KVM. Only KVM tools are horrifically immature. So for example: – virsh can’t shutdown KVM domains – virt-manager can’t do, well pretty much anything – start/stop/show console is about it – libvirt’s XML is badly documented, [...]