Articles in the misc category

  2. dd, netcat, and disk throughput

    I was trying to dump a large Logical Volume (LV) over ethernet from one machine to another. I found some behavior which surprised me.

    fun constraints

    • I have only a fairly minimal debian installation on each machine (which fortunately includes netcat-traditional)
    • The two machines are connected directly by a single …

  3. dealing with entropy on a virtual machine

    I've been using virtual machines (KVM, these days) as isolated environments to do things like build packages as root. Unfortunately, some of these activities require decent-sized chunks of random data (pulled from /dev/random). But /dev/random pulls from the kernel's entropy pool, which in turn is replenished from "hardware …

  6. Tools should be distinct from Services

    Modern daemon implementations can be run in a variety of ways, in a range of contexts. The daemon software itself can be a useful tool in environments where the associated traditional system service is neither needed nor desired. Unfortunately, common debian packaging practice has a tendency to conflate the two …

  7. xen etch to lenny upgrade serial console

    I maintain several xen machines. Most servers that i maintain use serial consoles (i should probably write another post in more detail about why serial consoles are the One True Way to manage a server).

    Trouble is, the way that xen works with the serial console has changed between etch …

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