I just ran across Jordan Sissel's sysadvent project, where he posted one article about systems administration each day from the 1st of December to the 25th.
Jordan has been a great communicator when we've exchanged mail (he's the author of xdotool, which i maintain for debian). Unsurprisingly, his posts in …
I've been playing around with an eeePC 900, which is very well-supported by debian. Kudos to the eeepc team!
I had one problem with it, after upgrading
eeepc-acpi-scripts
from version 1.0.4 to 1.0.9: with 1.0.4, i was able to use an ACPI
hotkey to …
Ever thought that there should be an automated way to handle ssh keys? Do you know the administrators of your servers, and wish that SSH could verify new host keys from them automatically, based on your personal connections to the web-of-trust? Do you wish you could revoke and/or rotate …
On the testing and unstable systems that i run, i occasionally get a disturbing "there are N newly obsolete packages" message. For example
[0 root@squeak ~]# aptitude updateHit http://cmrg.fifthhorseman.net unstable Release.gpg [...]Get:42 http://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main [2077kB] Fetched 15.2MB in 57s …A high school student i work with is trying to gather data on the prevalence of mirror-reading (the ability to easily read text that is reversed left-to-right).
He's posted a simple webapp to gather data points for his experiment. It should take only a couple of minutes to try it …
The CIO and the Office For Technology of New York State (USA) just released a new report on electronic records strategy, titled A Strategy for Openness: Enhancing E-Records Access in New York State.
I submitted my own comments during the call for public comments earlier this year -- apparently there were …
An interesting thread on
openssh-unix-dev points
out a way that a compromised remote ssh account or host could
potentially trick users into divulging the passphrase for their local
secret key. Given that we're all dealing with the potential for
compromised ssh hosts lately, i think this is an important
consideration …
I'm excited by version 7 of
debhelper, in
particular the opportunity for debian/rules minimization. I suspect
this will lower the barrier for rapid, reasonable packaging of simple
software tools in a way that should be easy to audit and maintain.
The most-minimized debian/rules possible with it is just …
So i've been struggling with an Ubuntu 8.04 networked workstation. It
uses libpam-mount to
mount the user's homedir (actually, the mountpoint is one level up from
the homedir) automatically at login over CIFS.
One of the problems i ran into with this arrangement happened because i was following the …
I finally got to try out goodbye-microsoft.com this past weekend. It uses similar principles as UNetbootin, which Utumno recently wrote about. I had a donated machine in a computer lab i volunteer at with a flakey CD-ROM which i couldn't get to netboot. Since it had Windows already on …