And talking of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook and how outdated it is, I came across The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered, digesting quickly through each chapter of the book and show nice counter arguments.
UNIX-HATERS Handbook
I’m still reading the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. I must confess it is very fun to read and it’s pretty obvious that it was written circa 1994 [1] because it contains some (currently) irrelevant comments like:
Unix was developed in a research environment where systems rarely stayed up for several days. It was not designed to stay up [...]
libvirt and bridged networking
libvirt and virt-manager are a blessing. They bring powerful, free, open source management to Xen- and KVM-based virtualization environments.
I’ve been using both for quite a while. Also, I’ve always prefered bridged networking support for my virtual machines over NAT. While NAT is non-disruptive and allows for isolation, I typically like to easily access services provided [...]
Warehouse-scale computers
Interesting paper by Urs and Luiz, from Google Inc., named Warehouse-scale computers about building big-scale computing clusters, datacenters, power efficiency, cooling, performance, parallel computing, modeling costs, dealing with failures, etc.
Comments on building a new RAID5 array
I’ve rescued the following e-mail from Neil Brown about building a new RAID5 array in Linux and why one the disks, while the array is being constructed, is marked as a spare:
When creating a new raid5 array, we need to make sure the parity
blocks are all correct (obviously). There are several ways to do
this.
Write [...]
LVM snapshots and non-destructive Linux upgrades
This post roughly describes what I do when I want to non-destructively upgrade my Linux system. By non-destructive means a procedure that allows me to upgrade but also to rollback if something goes wrong. As an example, I wanted to upgrade my Ubuntu system from Jaunty to Karmic. Since Karmic is now Alpha 1, the [...]
Official Chromium builds for Mac OS X
Recently, the Chromium team has started to provide official builds of Chromium for Mac OS X. Looks to me these builds are just the output of the continuous build process — also known as waterfall.
In any case, these are good news and to me a proof that Chromium for Mac OS X keeps evolving [...]
Have Postfix relay e-mail to GMail
This post documents how I did set up Postfix 2.6 to relay all of its e-mail to GMail.
I used different sources to assemble what is described next. Worth mentioning are Getting Postfix to work on Ubuntu with Gmail, Gmail on Home Linux Box using Postfix and Fetchmail, Postfix Gmail SMTP Relay and finally Postfix TLS [...]
OpenBSD, dynamic and static IP address on the same interface
Today I was faced with the following problem: I was trying to configure one of the Ethernet interfaces of an OpenBSD 4.5 box with both a dynamic address leased via DHCP, but also a static IP address. Initially, I tried this:
# cat /etc/hostname.vr2
dhcp
inet 1.1.1.11 255.255.255.0 NONE
up
# sh /etc/netstart vr2
The problem with this approach is that [...]
Chromium for Mac OS X
Chromium is the open source browser developed by Google. The differences between Chromium and Chrome are very minimal. Chrome has custom icons and other parafernalia that, due to licensing issues, can’t be made available in Chromium. Chrome is also available as a binary for Microsoft Windows operating systems, and can be downloaded from the Google [...]