I’ve just been given a set of Hive Bluetooth speakers by MobileZap (see this link for all their Bluetooth speakers) [1]. The speakers charge by a micro-USB cable so I started charging them in…| etbe - Russell Coker
Someone asked on a mailing list about the issues related to whether to use a label, UUID, or device name for /etc/fstab. The first thing to consider is where the names come from. The UUID is assign…| etbe - Russell Coker
In my previous post about Advice for Speakers [1] I referred to the common problem of going through presentation materiel too quickly due to being nervous. In extreme cases (which tend to happen wh…| etbe - Russell Coker
Leon Brooks linked to this article claiming that sound not electricity travels through nerves. When you put a moderate voltage through your body it will cause muscle action (try putting 1000V at lo…| etbe - Russell Coker
Ben Hutchings announced that the Debian kernel team are now building Xen flavoured kernels for Debian/Unstable [1]. Thanks to Max Attems and the rest of the kernel team for this and all their other…| etbe - Russell Coker
I’ve just bught an NVidia video card from Computers and Parts Land (CPL) [1]. I asked for a PCIe*8 card but was assured that a PCIe*16 card would work. However when I got it home I discovered…| etbe - Russell Coker
I just watched an interesting TED.com talk about video games [1]. The talk focussed to a large degree on emotional involvement in games, so it seems likely that there will be many more virtual girl…| etbe - Russell Coker
Just over a year ago I configured my blog to only allow signed in users to comment to reduce spam [1]. This has stopped all spam comments, it was even more successful than expected but spammers kee…| etbe - Russell Coker
Many people think that white-box machines (IE the cheapest no-nam PCs you can buy) are suitable for use as servers. There are several factors that make white-box machines totally unsuitable for use…| etbe - Russell Coker
It’s often the case with technology that serious changes occur at a particular price or performance point in development. Something has small use until it can be developed to a certain combin…| etbe - Russell Coker
There is a BTRFS bug in kernel 3.13 which is triggered by Kmail and causes Kmail index files to become seriously corrupt. Another bug in BTRFS causes a kernel GPF when an application tries to read …| etbe - Russell Coker
I’ve previously written Some Notes on DRBD [1] and a post about DRBD Benchmarking [2]. Previously I had determined that replication protocol C gives the best performance for DRBD, that the ba…| etbe - Russell Coker
Almost two years ago I blogged about a strange performance problem with SATA disks [1]. The problem was that certain regions of a disk gave poor linear read performance on some machines, but perfor…| etbe - Russell Coker
Below is a GNUPlot graph of ZCAV output from a 250G SATA disk. The disk has something wrong with it (other disks of the same brand in machines of the same configuration give more regular graphs). T…| etbe - Russell Coker
I previously wrote about my first experiences with BTRFS [1]. Since then I’ve been using BTRFS on more systems and have had good results. The main problem I want to address is with the reliab…| etbe - Russell Coker
This paper by Rodney Van Meter about ZCAV (Zoned Constant Angular Velocity) in hard drives is very interesting. It predates my work by about four years and includes some interesting methods of coll…| etbe - Russell Coker
I have been asked for advice about long-term storage of documents. I decided to blog about it because my thoughts may be useful to others, and because if I get something wrong then surely people wi…| etbe - Russell Coker
disk = [ ‘phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w’, ‘phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w’, ‘phy:/dev/vg/xen1-drbd,hdc,w’, ‘phy:/dev/vg/san,hdd,w!’ ] For some work that I am d…| etbe - Russell Coker
I just lent two 80G IDE drives to a friend, and he re-paid me with 160G drives. Generally I don’t mind people repaying hardware loans with better gear (much better than repaying with the same…| etbe - Russell Coker
I was in a discussion about flash on a closed mailing list, so I’ll post my comments here. I believe that flash will soon be suitable for main storage on most desktop and laptop machines (whi…| etbe - Russell Coker
On a closed mailing list someone wrote: 2 X 120gb ide drives installed as slaves on each ide channels. … Presto. A 230’ish GB storage NAS for all my junk. I’m not going to write a…| etbe - Russell Coker
Werdahias wrote an informative blog post about Dark Mode for QT programs on non-QT environments (mostly GNOME based), we need more blog posts about this sort of thing [1]. Astral Codex Ten has an i…| etbe - Russell Coker
I just started looking at the Kubernetes documentation and interactive tutorial [1], which incidentally is really good. Everyone who is developing a complex system should look at this to get some i…| etbe - Russell Coker
I’ve just got a Dell R710 server for LUV and I’ve been playing with the configuration options. Here’s a list of what I’ve done and recommendations on how to do things. I dec…| etbe - Russell Coker
Today I received a Dell PowerEDGE T105 for use by a client. My client had some servers for development and testing hosted in a server room at significant expense. They also needed an offsite backup…| etbe - Russell Coker
The FOSS Android program for communicating with smart watches is Gadget Bridge which now has support for the Colmi P80 [1]. I first blogged about the Colmi P80 just over a month ago [2]. Now I have…| etbe - Russell Coker
When discussing the machine there are two common comments I get. One is a suggestion that I am putting myself at risk, I think that the risk of visiting random web sites is significantly greater. A…| etbe - Russell Coker
My SE Linux Play Machine has been online again since the 18th of March. On Monday the 11th of Feb I took it offline after a user managed to change the password for my own account. Part of the probl…| etbe - Russell Coker
After over a year I have finally got a SE Linux Play Machine online again. The details for logging in are at this link [1]. I’ve created T-shirt and mug designs with the login details too, th…| etbe - Russell Coker
I work on SE Linux to improve security for all computer users. I think that my work has gone reasonably well in that regard in terms of directly improving security of computers and helping develope…| etbe - Russell Coker
I was asked for advice on how to start learning Linux. Rather than replying via email I’m writing a blog post for future people who ask such questions and also to get comments from other peop…| etbe - Russell Coker
A recent news item is the “hacking” of the Yahoo mailbox used by Sarah Palin (the Republican VP candidate) [1]. It seems most likely that it was a simple social-engineering attack on th…| etbe - Russell Coker
SAS and SATA are electrically compatible to a degree that allows connecting a SATA storage device to a SAS controller. The SAS controller understands the SATA protocol so this works. A SAS device c…| etbe - Russell Coker
The Dell T320 Almost 2 years ago I made a Dell PowerEdge T320 my home server [1]. It was a decent upgrade from the PowerEdge T110 II that I had used previously. One benefit of that system was that …| etbe - Russell Coker
I recently bought a couple of PowerEdge T320 servers, so now to learn about setting them up. They are a little newer than the R710 I recently setup (which had iDRAC version 6), they have iDRAC vers…| etbe - Russell Coker
I have just updated the BIOS on a Dell PowerEdge T110 II. The process isn’t too difficult, Google for the machine name and BIOS, download a shell script encoded firmware image and GPG signatu…| etbe - Russell Coker
A non-profit organisation I support has just bought a Dell PowerEdge T410 server to be mainly used as a file server. We need a reasonable amount of space and really good reliability features becaus…| etbe - Russell Coker
Dimitri John Ledkov wrote an informative blog post about self encrypting disks and UEFI with Linux [1]. This Coffeezilla video highlights an interesting scam, run a broker for day traders and don’t execute trades, just be the counterparty for every trade and rely on day traders losing [2]. First Sight is a Dust SciFi short [...]| etbe – Russell Coker
I’ve just started using zram for swap on VMs. The use of compression for swap in Linux apparently isn’t new, it’s been in the Linux kernel since version 3.2 (since 2012). But until recent years I hadn’t used it. When I started using Mobian (the Debian distribution for phones) zram was in the default setup, [...]| etbe – Russell Coker
The Problem Just over 2 years ago my Dell T320 server had a motherboard failure [1]. I recently bought another T320 that had been gutted (no drives, PSUs, or RAM) and put the bits from my one in it…| etbe - Russell Coker
Hardware I received my PinePhone Pro [1] on Thursday, it seems in many ways better than the Purism Librem 5 [2] that I have previously written about. The PinePhone is thinner, lighter, and yet has …| etbe - Russell Coker
In May 2014 I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition tablet (wikipedia page [1]) with 32G of storage. It’s display is 2560×1600 resolution which still compares well to the latest tabl…| etbe - Russell Coker
Since my last blog post about the PineTime [1] I haven’t done anything exciting with it. I’ve been wearing it every day and it’s working reasonably well for me. It’s been wo…| etbe - Russell Coker
I’ve just discovered a new xterm replacement named Kitty [1]. It boasts about being faster due to threading and using the GPU and it does appear faster on some of my systems but that’s …| etbe - Russell Coker
I just bought a Colmi P80 SmartWatch from Aliexpress for $26.11 based on this blog post reviewing it [1]. The main things I was after in this was a larger higher resolution screen because my vision…| etbe - Russell Coker
Some years ago when I first got a LG U990 Viewty (which in some ways is the best phone I ever owned) I went swimming and left my phone in my bag. My phone happened to rest on my car keys and had vi…| etbe - Russell Coker
The German supermarket chain Aldi recently had a special deal of a “wine-fridge” for $99. A wine fridge really isn’t that specialised for wine, it is merely a fridge that has a he…| etbe - Russell Coker
I have just discovered an innovative Melbourne company that has apparently been running for five years. ReWine is a wine seller that sells bottles of wine and then refills the same bottles for a lo…| etbe - Russell Coker
One thing that annoys me on TV shows and movies is getting the details wrong. Yes it’s fiction and yes some things can’t be done correctly and in some situations correctly portraying th…| etbe - Russell Coker
An issue that causes ongoing discussion is what is the purpose of a Planet installation such as Planet Debian [1]. The discussion usually seems to take the less effective form of what is “app…| etbe - Russell Coker
Albert writes about software development and how much teamwork is used [1]. He makes an interesting clash of analogies by suggesting that it’s not a “team sport” because “it…| etbe - Russell Coker
A common question is how to compare Fedora [1] and Debian [2] in terms of recent updates and support. I think that Fedora Rawhide and Debian/Unstable are fairly equivalent in this regard, new upstr…| etbe - Russell Coker
USER=username API_KEY=1234ABC OUTPUTDIR=/var/spool/sms LOG_SERVICE=local1 I’ve just written the below script to send SMS via the inteltech.com/clicksend.com service. It takes the above config…| etbe - Russell Coker
Dustin Kirkland wrote an interesting post about fingerprint authentication [1]. He suggests using fingerprints for identifying users (NOT authentication) and gives an example of a married couple sh…| etbe - Russell Coker
After upgrading a mail server to Debian/Unstable (which will soon be released as Wheezy) I started getting SASL errors. 535 5.7.8 Error: authentication failed: no mechanism available The SMTP proto…| etbe - Russell Coker
I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch – to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if…| etbe - Russell Coker
I am not an expert at public speaking. Attending Toastmasters to improve my speaking skills is on my todo list. However having given hundreds of talks over the course of about 14 years and being pa…| etbe - Russell Coker
I attend many presentations and have seen many that had a lower quality than they should have. Some things are difficult to change (for example I have difficulty speaking slowly). But there are som…| etbe - Russell Coker
In regard to my post yesterday about Planet Debian I received the following response: James Purser said I’m betting that your feed is an atom feed. We had the same problem on PLOA with Jeff a…| etbe - Russell Coker
In a comment on my blog post titled Childhood, Don Marti refers to an earlier blog post he wrote which refers to a New York Magazine article about the effects of praising children. The article does…| etbe - Russell Coker
On several occasions I have watched part of a TV documentary on gifted children, but I have never been able to watch one completely because every one that I have seen has been offensively wrong. On…| etbe - Russell Coker
Apparently they are planning a reality TV show that might be named “Kids Nation” where 40 children are allowed to develop their own society for 40 days. The claims are that there is …| etbe - Russell Coker
Adam Rosi-Kessel made an interesting post about They Might Be Giants producing children’s music because their original fan base are now old enough to have children. From casual inspection of …| etbe - Russell Coker
One problem I have had with my new Dell PowerEdge server/workstation [1] is that sound doesn’t work correctly. When I initially installed it things were OK but after installing a new monitor …| etbe - Russell Coker
The Problem I’ve just upgraded my Dell PowerEdge T105 [1] from Debian/Lenny to Debian/Squeeze. Unfortunately the result of the upgrade was that everything in an X display looked very green wh…| etbe - Russell Coker
In the comments on my post about the Dell PowerEdge T105 server [1] there is some discussion of the internal USB port (which allows the use of a USB flash device for booting which is connected insi…| etbe - Russell Coker
Here are some basic things to do when debugging storage performance problems on Linux. It’s deliberately not an advanced guide, I might write about more advanced things in a later post. Disk …| etbe - Russell Coker
The Problem Some of my clients need systems that store reasonable amounts of data. This is enough data that we can expect some data corruption on disk such that traditional RAID doesn’t work,…| etbe - Russell Coker
I recently had to decommission an old Linux server and replace it with a new machine. When I was about to turn it off I noticed a power cable of the type used for IDE hard drives leaving the Linux …| etbe - Russell Coker
Eweek has an article on a new 1TB Seagate drive. Most home users don’t have a need for 1TB of storage (the only way I’ve ever filled a 300G drive is by using it for multiple backups) an…| etbe - Russell Coker
I’ve just been playing with Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) [1] which is also known as Management Engine Bios Extension (MEBX). Firstly a disclaimer, using this sort of techn…| etbe - Russell Coker
I just did a Debian install on a Dell PowerEdge T30 for a client. The Dell web site is a bit broken at the moment, it didn’t list the price of that server or give useful specs when I was orde…| etbe - Russell Coker
I have returned from the US and my SE Linux Play Machine [1] is online again. It was unfortunate that I forgot to pack one of my Play machine shirts, I ended up attending a meeting of the SDForum […| etbe - Russell Coker
As Debian/Lenny has been released and the temperatures in my part of the world are no longer insanely hot I have put my SE Linux Play Machine [1] online again. It is running Debian/Lenny and is a X…| etbe - Russell Coker
I just read an interesting blog post about ML security recommended by Bruce Schneier [1]. This approach of having 2 AI systems where one processes user input and the second performs actions on quar…| etbe - Russell Coker
An anti-spam measure that is used by a very small number of people is that of verifying the sender address by connecting to the sending mail server. For example when I send mail from russell@coker.…| etbe - Russell Coker
Currently there is a problem with the MySQL default install in Debian/Etch (and probably other distributions too). It sets up “root” with dba access with no password by default, the fol…| etbe - Russell Coker
Mark Shuttleworth has written an interesting post about Ubuntu release dates [1]. He claims that free software distributions are better able to meet release dates than proprietary OSs because they …| etbe - Russell Coker
I recently had to setup some Linux workstations with 802.1x authentication (described as “Ethernet authentication”) to connect to a smart switch. The most useful web site I found was th…| etbe - Russell Coker
Firstly for smooth running of the presentations it would be ideal if laptops were provided for displaying all presentations (obviously this wouldn’t work for live software demos but it would …| etbe - Russell Coker
In a comment on my previous post about ECC RAM someone commented that Dell sells PowerEdge desktop machines with ECC RAM. I visited the Dell web site and found that a low-end PowerEdge tower server…| etbe - Russell Coker
Following from my 5 minute OSDC talk yesterday on 5 security improvements needed in Linux distributions I gave a 5 minute talk on installing SE Linux on Debian etch. To display the notes I formatte…| etbe - Russell Coker
I have previously written about how I refused an offer of a free iPhone [1] (largely due to it’s closed architecture). The first Google Android phone has just been announced, the TechCrunch r…| etbe - Russell Coker
James Purser writes about the current plans for Internet filtering in Australia and concentrates on the technical issues (whether it will degrade the ISP service) and the issue of who’s moral…| etbe - Russell Coker
I’ve had a saga of getting 4K monitors to work well. My latest issue has been video playing, the dreaded mplayer error about the system being too slow. My previous post about 4K was about usi…| etbe - Russell Coker
The Problem Video playback looks better with a higher scan rate. A lot of content that was designed for TV (EG almost all historical documentaries) is going to be 25Hz interlaced (UK and Australia)…| etbe - Russell Coker
It’s been 2 years since my last blog post about storage trends [1]. Minimum Storage <=2TB In 2021 I stated that as MSY had 2TB disks for $72 and 2TB SSD for $245 it was barely worth consid…| etbe - Russell Coker
The Viability of Small Disks Less than a year ago I wrote a blog post about storage trends [1]. My main point in that post was that disks smaller than 2TB weren’t viable then and 2TB disks wo…| etbe - Russell Coker
