I recently stumbled upon an awesome tool called Namebench. Namebench it’s a small program wrote in python that search for the fastest DNS server near to you. Namebench runs benchmarks using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation. Namebench is completely free and does not modify […]
Read MoreI’m a huge fan of the oldschool “patch” command, and sometimes in the wild I use Gitorious’ “raw diff” view which puts the changes in easy to read patch format. However, you can also do this on the command line to create a patch file that can be applied using “patch -p0 < patchfile". git […]
Read MoreI just upgraded to Firefox 6 on Ubuntu. The new version doesn’t have any major interface changes but is 20% faster than Firefox 5. Startup time has also been improved especially for those like me with a lot of tabs and groups. Firefox 6 uses about 8% less resources than the older version so it […]
Read MoreTo migrate from Virtuozzo VPS to OpenVZ you must “rsync” root area to private area to avoid incompatibility of OpenVZ and Virtuozzo Cache Templates. 1. Create your VPS with id 3 using your desired template (for example) # vzctl create 3 –ostemplate ubuntu-11.04-x86_64 –conf unlimited Creating container private area (ubuntu-11.04-x86_64) Performing postcreate actions Saved parameters […]
Read MoreGraphite is a highly scalable real-time graphing system. We use it to graph all sorts of metrics. Basically, you write an application that collects numeric time-series data that you are interested in graphing, and send it to Graphite’s processing backend, carbon, which stores the data in Graphite’s specialized database. The data can then be visualized […]
Read MoreGit is a distributed revision control system with an emphasis on speed. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. This guide will walk you through the basics of getting up and running with git. First, you’ll need to install the client. If you’re using Ubuntu, you’ll want apt-get. Obviously […]
Read MoreMany folks will know this in many other programming languages (C, C++, etc) as a “pointer”, but what if you’re a bash kid at heart and you want to define a variable within a variable? I encountered this exact quandary today while coding a pretty sophisticated script which reaches back into the past for data. […]
Read MoreAs you’re probably aware, the latest Ubuntu version looks very different. This isn’t a coincidence, they’ve changed from Gnome to Unity. Since Ubuntu started to build their own shell Unity, they have ditched Gnome shell entirely. You won’t even find Gnome 3 on the official repos! Many people within my industry and within the Linux […]
Read More“pianobar” is a free/open-source, console-based replacement for pandora’s flash player. “pianobarfly” is a patched version of it, which adds some pretty awesome features including capturing music from your stream into a local .mp3 file format. Features – play and manage (create, add more music, delete, rename, …) your stations – rate played songs and let […]
Read MoreThose of you making the conversion from gnome to unity in this latest Ubuntu release will notice quite a few changes. When I installed 11.04 on my office workstation (with dual monitors), Unity’s vertical launcher appeared in the middle of the two screens (on the very left of the right hand monitor). This is probably […]
Read More
Erik
Friday, September 23, 2011
linux administration - tips, notes and projects
No Comment