In order to have an anonymous-only FTP server that allows anonymous uploads, based on vsftpd running on Ubuntu 9.10, I applied the following configuration changes:

— /etc/vsftpd.conf.orig 2010-01-13 02:00:46.287216196 +0100
+++ /etc/vsftpd.conf 2010-01-13 01:59:34.787215294 +0100
@@ -26,16 +26,18 @@
#local_enable=YES
#
# Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command.
-#write_enable=YES
+write_enable=YES
#
# Default umask for local users is [...]

While trying to use Chromium on a Ubuntu 64-bit machine, I discovered I wasn’t able to browse to any web page. I always got the following error message:

This webpage is not available.
The webpage at http://www.google.com/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
Here are some suggestions:
Reload this web [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Recently, I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and found that my Thinkpad’s TrackPoint scrolling stopped working. While searching on the Internet, I found a post called Scrolling with the Thinkpad’s TrackPoint in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid by Phil Sung that explains in a clear and concise way how to enabling scrolling in Ubuntu 8.10 using [...]

For the past few days, and after a few hours of uptime, mplayer refused to play videos. It was hanging while trying to open the ALSA audio. I could verify this because using -ao none as a command-line argument to mplayer fixed (as in being able to play a video with no sound) the problem.
Tired [...]

This post is not about doing a PXE-based network installation of Ubuntu. There are already many posts describing how to do this. This post is about setting up an Ubuntu workstation in diskless mode, such as the workstation boots via PXE and the root filesystem is mounted over NFS.
The process consists on the following main [...]

Introduction
DISCLAIMER: The contents of this post are mostly based on Manual Installation How-To. Thanks to Brent Davidson and Fabian Franz for writing such a nice HowTo and the beautiful open and free implementation of FreeNX, respectively.
I decided to use FreeNX instead of NoMachine’s own implementation due to the instability of the latter. Most of the [...]

Recently I purchased two external USB hard-drives, one from LACIE and another one from IOMEGA, that I plugged into one of my Linux workstations. I wanted these drives to be auto-mounted during boot, so I created a couple of entries in /etc/fstab. The problem is that, somehow, the Linux kernel is not always able to [...]