Technical Archives

A curated selection of 25 posts written between 2010 and 2017, drawn from a longer-running Linux and systems administration blog. They are kept for two reasons. The problems are durable — failing disks, runaway InnoDB files, misbehaving RAID controllers and mis-serving name servers have outlasted every tool here that addressed them. And they are a record of the hands-on years underneath the work I do now.

Commands and package names reflect the distributions of their time. Read them as history that still occasionally works.

Storage, RAID & Recovery

2017Fun with fsck on Fedora - avoiding mounted partitions and handling LUKS encrypted ones
2011MegaCLI Cheat Sheet
2011Drive failure? ddrescue to the rescue!
2010Linux: Recover Corrupted Partition From A Bad Superblock
2010Moving Array and Virtual Disks from One System to Another
2010RAID: Rebuilding a Foreign disk by hand
2010How To Upgrade From Ext3 To Ext4 Without Formatting The Hard Disk

Databases

2012How to shrink an ibdata1 file with minimal MySQL downtime
2011Writing Python code to use MySQL
2011Repair and optimize all mysql tables from CLI

Networking & DNS

2015Configure Postfix to use a remote SMTP relay server via alternate port
2010how to disable recursive queries in bind
2010DNS Zones and Serial Numbers 101

Security

2016How to install CSF Firewall on CentOS 7
2014Remote vulnerability in bash – patches available for CVE-2014-6271, CVE-2014-7169
2010How to disable SSH host key checking
2010Open Source Tripwire Intrusion Detection for Linux

Monitoring & Performance

2011Full Graphite and statds installation on CentOS
2010dstat: a powerful system administration tool
2010process accounting
2010when apache simply won't start, check the semaphores!

Virtualization & Hosting

2014Virtualization: KVM equivalent to "vzctl enter" in OpenVZ
2011How to migrate a Virtuozzo VPS to OpenVZ

Development Tooling

2016Optimizing a previously large and bloated git repository
2012Linux Protip: How to make a patch file