../Blog

I've been thinking a lot lately about the value that tracking personal data has the potential to add, and about the costs that often comes with it. For example, devices like Fitbits or Garmins can provide useful insight into your fitness routine.

I recently updated my Bash prompt. It started because I wanted to incorporate git status information into the prompt. But once I got that working it turned out I didn't really like it so I ditched it but kept the other stuff I did.

There comes a time in every sysadmin's life where they need to run SSH on an alternate port. Should be as simple as adding multiple Port <number> directives to /etc/sshd/config and issuing a restart to the daemon.

I was doing some backups and realized my photos, which I keep in Dropbox (sue me) were taking up about 50G. I knew there had to be a lot of duplicates but searching for them through 50G of files would be tedious. This seemed like a task that should be easily solvable with a simple one-line but my shell-foo was simply not up to the task.

I recently ran into some trouble with the system while mucking around and decided to take the opportunity to restructure my partitioning layout and do a full OS reinstall; this time with full disk encryption (except /boot). Suffice it to say, the Fedora installer is fairly flexible, but not nearly enough to support a mix of mdadm, LUKS, and LVM.

Here's the weather function I use when I'm too lazy to look out the window. The only configuration is a free forecast.io API key. The main selling point is that it geolocates so you don't have to remember where you are. Though this has drawbacks if you're running it on remote servers far from your location. If that's a problem then go get one of those silly weather() functions that doesn't know where it is unless you tell it.

Let's say you're a Linux admin in a Windows shop (ha) and you'd like to be able to access your company shares via a real operating system. Even more, you'd like these shares to be accessible immediately after boot.

I recently implemented LVM caching based largely on Richard WM Jones' post and thought I'd document my own experience here.

I fired up my first CentOS 7 instance and there are a lot of new things that I’ve been avoiding learning. Namely, FirewallD.