Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes Comparison Guide

A lot of companies are unsure which solution to choose and many may not be aware of Docker Swarm as an alternative to Kubernetes. One thing that many Sysadmins find is that Docker Swarm is simply easier, quicker to setup and maintain by far than Kubernetes.........

When is it time to leave your VPS/VDS Cloud Hosting Provider?

When Is It Time to Leave Your VPS, VDS, and Dedicated Server Provider? Choosing the right hosting solution—be it Virtu........

Cisco 2900 3900 Router Password Reset How To Reset Enable Password

It is a bit different and annoying here for these types of routers/models as you need to physically remove the CF (Compact Flash) and only then, will it enter ROMMON mode (Ctrl + Pause remotely over the console will not do it for us). This means you cannot do this remotely, or at least not without the help of a remote/physical helper. Step 1.) Power off, router and remove CF Disk Slot#2 Go to the router and remove the slot#2 cover uses your hand or it may help to use a........

LightDM Mint Ubuntu Debian won't start errors Nvidia Graphics

This error implies that there may be an issue with Xorg or maybe your NVIDIA GPU cannot start or initialize: 35 laptop kernel: [ 2031.857704] nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel. 35 laptop kernel: [ 2031.857724] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel. 35 laptop kernel: [ 2031.857725] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint 35 laptop kernel: [ 2031.873280] nvidia: module verification failed: signature a........

How To Do Linux Network Bonding Teaming in Mint Debian Ubuntu

Bonding is an excellent way to get both increased redundancy and throughput. It is similar to the "Network Teaming" feature in Windows. There are a few different modes but we will use mode 6, I think it's the best of both worlds, as it is not just a failover, but it provides round robin, so you will get redundancy and load balancing. So if you have a 1G single port, you will have a combined throughput of 4G at this point. Just bear in mind that the true thr........

GlusterFS HowTo Tutorial For Distributed Storage in Docker, Kubernetes, LXC, KVM, Proxmox

This can be used on almost anything, since Gluster is a userspace tool, based on FUSE. This means that all Gluster appears as to any application is just a directory. Applications don't need specific support for Gluster, so long as you can tell the application to use a certain directory for storage. One application can be for redundant and scaled storage, including for within Docker and Kubernetes, LXC, Proxmox, OpenStack, etc or just your image/web/video files or even da........

(firefox:9562): LIBDBUSMENU-GLIB-WARNING **: Unable to get session bus: Failed to execute child process "dbus-launch" (No such file or directory) Solution

(firefox:9562): LIBDBUSMENU-GLIB-WARNING **: Unable to get session bus: Failed to execute child process "dbus-launch" (No such file or directory) ExceptionHandler::GenerateDump cloned child 9743 ExceptionHandler::WaitForContinueSignal waiting for continue signal... ExceptionHandler::SendContinueSignalToChild sent continue signal to child [Parent 9562, Gecko_IOThread] WARNING: pipe error (40): Connection reset by peer: file /build/firefox-EymEXX/fire........

Docker Tutorial HowTo Install Docker, Use and Create Docker Container Images Clustering Swarm Mode Monitoring Service Hosting Provider

The Best Docker Tutorial for Beginners We quickly explain the basic Docker concepts and show you how to do the most common tasks from starting your first container, to making custom images, a Docker Swarm Cluster Tutorial, docker compose and Docker buildfiles.........

Proxmox How To Enable Ceph Distributed Storage Cluster with OSD and Pools

How To Install Ceph If you stopped an install of Ceph midway you will need to manually restart it with "pveceph install" Remember that your VM needs to have working internet (gateway) and DNS in order to connect to the apt repo to download all of the packages that Ceph requires. Remember to repeat these steps for each node that you want Ceph on. ........

Proxmox Services Won't Start Failed to start The Proxmox VE cluster filesystem. Proxmox VE firewall. PVE Status Daemon. Proxmox VE scheduler. PVE Cluster HA Resource Manager Daemon. PVE Local HA Resource Manager Daemon.

There are many reasons why Proxmox services may not start, but one common one, is if you have changed your /etc/hostname or /etc/hosts and don't have a valid FQDN (eg. proxmox01 instead proxmox01.com). Failed to start The Proxmox VE cluster filesystem. Failed to start Proxmox VE firewall. Failed to start PVE Status Daemon. Failed to start Proxmox VE scheduler. Failed to start PVE Cluster HA Resource Manager Daemon. Failed to star........

How to install Kubernetes with microk8s and deploy apps on Debian/Mint/Ubuntu Linux

Kubernetes Easy Beginners Tutorial/Architecture Guide Kubernetes is known as container orchestration and we should start at explaining the container part of it. A Container is what runs the actual application and based on an Image, and are more comparable to something like an LXC Container, Virtuozzo/OpenVZ using the Linux Kernel Namespaces feature. Containers run these images as independent, isolated operating environments under the O........

How To Resize, Reduce a Video to a Specific Size and Quality Ubuntu Linux using ffmpeg

This is a common issue when e-mailing or uploading video files. One note is that you should make the filesize you choose below about 20% smaller than you need. For example I took a 219MB video and told it to be 20M. The resulting file was still about 21.9M but it was OK when I said 18M and was barely below the 20M size. ffmpeg is our friend here, just use this command: Change the -fs 100Mto the size you want eg. 20M, 500M Chan........

Radeon R3 GPU on Debian Crashing

Occasionally my whole screen locks up and I cannot even swith to the console and I find this in my syslog: *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Mullins [Radeon R3 Graphics] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] ........

mpv / mplayer with Radeon / AMD GPU Video Card Driver enable VDPAU GPU Accelerated Video Decoding

The easiest way to know if your videos are playing with GPU acceleration are to watch the process of xplayer, mpv or whatever you are playing. The CPU usage should be no more than 10% for that process/program if it is using acceleration. Let's manually play with vdpau to make sure it works before we make it permanent: First make sure you have libvdpau installed: sudo apt install vdpau-driver-all If yo........

Linux Ubuntu Debian Missing privilege separation directory: /var/run/sshd

service sshd status ● ssh.service - OpenBSD Secure Shell server Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/ssh.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: failed (Result: start-limit-hit) since Wed 2019-10-02 11:07:54 EDT; 36s ago Process: 476 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/sshd -t (code=exited, status=255) Oct 02 11:07:54 box systemd[1]: Failed to start OpenBSD Secure Shell server. Oct 02 11:07:54 box sys........

Ubuntu Debian Mint Linux SSHD OpenSSH Server Not Starting After Reboot Solution

If you get error messages like this it is usually because /var/run/sshd does not exist. root@userbox:/# service sshd status ● ssh.service - OpenBSD Secure Shell server Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/ssh.service; enabled; vendor preset: enab Active: failed (Result: start-limit-hit) since Wed 2019-04-10 02:24:44 EDT; 1 Process: 511 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/sshd -t (code=exited, status=255)........

Centos 7 Reallocate logical volume space to another

Do you hate how Centos 7 defaults to allocating most of your valuable space to /home even though it is a production server? Here is a quick guide on how to take back that space live, while online (of course make sure you have backups just in case something goes wrong!): First we will reduce our home dir by 100G: lvreduce -L -100G /dev/mapper/centos-home WARNING: Reducing active and open logical volume to ........

lvm how to reduce volume size

lvreduce -L -100G /dev/mapper/centos-home Do you really want to reduce centos/home? [y/n]: y Size of logical volume centos/home changed from ........

Proxmox Breaks Storage/LVM Backing If Killing QEMU-IMG

I tried to stop a qemu-img copy or clone and it broke everything. It was fine to "stop" it from the GUI but a process still persisted so I killed the relevant qemu-img and the kernel went crazy. It also may not have helped that I tried to lvremove a different volume (an unused disk). But either way it breaks LVM (you cannot even run lvdisplay) so a reboot is necessary. Jan 17 06:45:21 testserver kernel: [ 5680.439337] systemd-udevd D 0&nbs........

iSCSI on Centos 7 Configuration and Setup Guide for Initiator and Target

initiator = client target = server These are the first concepts you should understand which is that in iscsi essentially the "initiator" is the client and the "target" is the server. iSCSI is derived from the old fashioned SCSI that us oldtimers grew to love. The "i" stands for Internet and the SCSI stands for "Small Computers Systems Interface" (SCSI). iSCSI Target (Server)Setup targetcli is the pac........

How Does Cisco CUCM (Cisco Unified Communication Manager) Work?

Cisco's CUCM (Cisco Unified Communication Manager) is a system that combines voice, video, data and mobile products into a single unified management suite. At its core, the CUCMis like a "Super PBX" that controls the flow of all communications through an organization even single or multiple site deployments. Cisco's CUCMmakes communication more effective and simple through centralized management and unification of communications resources.........

What DNS Options Does Active Directory Offer in Windows Server 2008,2012,2016 ?

What Is Active Directory? Active Directory is essentially an enhanced, centralized database with a set of objects that make user management, authorization, and data management simpler. Active Directory is synonymous with "Domain Controllers" where a single "domain" often consists of multiple sites and members of the domain. Multiple domains can also be joined to belong to a tree ( a collection of domains). And the highest layer is the forest whi........

systemd management using systemctl and journalctl to check systemd logs

systemd is like the service manager for your Centos and other modern Linux distributions (including Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) allows you to enable services, stop them, restart them, check their status and even reboot your system. The key commands or arguments you will use with systemctl are the following: Unit Commands: list-units [PATTERN...] List loaded units &nbs........

AMD Set Fan Speed and Other Powerplay Memory/CPU Timings with a Linux script

You can do other things but this particular script is just to set all AMD cards to 80% fan speed (remember this script needs to applied everytime you reboot). You could set it is a cron or just throw it into /etc/rc.local basepath=/sys/class/drm for hwmon in `ls -1 /sys/class/drm|grep card[0-99]$`; do echo card=$hwmon; hwmonname=`ls $basepath/$hwmon/device/hwmon|grep hwmon[0-99]` hwmonpath=$basepath/$hwmon/device/hwmon/$hwmonname echo "ec........

VMWare ESXi 6.7 SSH/PowerShell CLI Commands

[root@localhost:~] BootModuleConfig.sh echo host-ind nfcd........

Centos 7 - How To Install NFS and Mount Remotely

Server Side Config 1.) First install nfs-utils yum -y install nfs-utils 2.) Configure nfs share Create a directory for your NFS share mkdir /datastore Create your NFS share in /etc/exports echo "/datastore 10.220.101.0/24(rw,sync,no_root_squash)" >> /etc/exports systemctl restart nfs........

Linux Mint USB Kernel Tainted and Locked Port/Dev File

Essentially a program I was running for mining did not terminate properly with Ctrl+C it is listed as defunct and cannot be killed, kernel is tainted and normal tricks to disable the port are impossible the dev and sys entries for the device cannot be browsed or interacted with in any form without a lockup of the request. The only solution is to reboot due to the kernel taint as far as I can find so far. [1130246.811056] INFO: task minerd:21861 blocked for more th........

USB 3.0 External HDD Enclosure Seagate UAS problems - [sdd] tag#1 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 70 04 08 68 00 00 00 08 00 00

This is a 8TB Seagate external USB 3.0 device apparently newer kernels use a module called "UAS" instead of "USB Storage" which causes issues as a lot of devices are not properly supported in UAS mode by the kernel driver. The solution some say is to disable UAS specifically for your USB device but I'd rather just disable UAS altogether. Solution blacklist UAS: *do not do this it does not work and just causes your USB 3.0........

mdadm and lvm how to completely disable and remove vg/pv/lv

In short the solution is just to use vgremove for the actual /dev/mapper device: vgremove /dev/mapper/backups-backuplv box mnt # mdadm --manage /dev/md8 --stop mdadm: Cannot get exclusive access to /dev/md8:Perhaps a running process, mounted filesystem or active volume group? box mnt # lv lvchange lvconvert lvcreate l........

mdadm frozen and doesn't realize array is dead/missing failed due to unplugged drives

This was a surprising bug but I unplugged all drives for an array md127. At first it was just 1 drive and mdadm seemed to notice this. I unplugged the second drive taking the array offline but mdadm did not realize it was offline and still showed a non-existent disk as being part of it. This created problems trying to unmount it or even to stop this array with mdadm freezing. As for how to fix it I can only think of making sure you are not in a mounted path of........

MySQLD Server shutdown remotely unexpectedly

170110 5:35:23 [Note] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Normal shutdown 170110 5:35:23 [Note] Event Scheduler: Purging the queue. 0 events 170110 5:35:23 InnoDB: Starting shutdown... 170110 5:35:24 InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 0 12765401 170110 5:35:24 [Note] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Shutdown complete 170110 05:35:24 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ended........

PYCURL ERROR 22 - The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found Solution

# yum -y install qemu-kvm Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Setting up Install Process Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * base: mirror.lzu.edu.cn * elrepo: ftp.utexas.edu * epel: ftp.jaist.ac.jp * extras: mirrors.aliyun.com * openvz-kernel-rhel6: mirror.fdcservers.net * openvz-utils: mirror.fdcservers.net * updates: mirrors.nwsuaf.edu.cn Resolving Dependencies........

fdisk wq causes hung process

I created a new partition table on a newly plugged in device and it caused fdisk to hang (even force kill does not work). It also may be a bad drive or some other issue because fdisk -l hangs after the first 2 HDDs (totaly of 8 HDDs on this system): [1232879.903596] INFO: task fdisk:27176 blocked for more than 120 seconds. [1232879.903607] Tainted: P&nbs........

ADATA SU800 256GB 3D NAND Flash SSD Test & Review

I keep reading these drives are slower, but they are cheap and still SSDand work very fast for my needs. As you can see the sequential read is 481-491MB/s, if I put them in MDADM RAID10 mode (normal RAID1) they should give me well over 900MB/s and with redundancy and being very cheap for what they offer. [1232206.315622] scsi 8:0:1:0: Direct-Access ATA ADATA SU800&........

blocked for more than 120 seconds issues with iowait and timeout on Live Linux distribution while writing to physical disk

This happened while an mdadm array was syncing, all access from writing a new blank file to opening a small .txt file was very slow: [222117.312078] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds [222117.685060] EXT3-fs (md0): using internal journal [222117.685096] EXT3-fs (md0): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode [222122.376847] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds [222122.602825] EXT3-fs (md2): using internal jour........

Centos 6 how to guide convert LVM non-RAID into mdadm 1/10 RAID array live without reinstalling

Here is the scenario you or a client have a remote machine that was installed as a standard/default minimal Centos 6.x machine on a single disk with LVM for whatever reason. Often many people do not know how to install it to a RAID array so it is common to have this problem and why reinstall if you don't need to? In some cases on a remote system you can't easily reinstall without physical or KVM access. So in this case you add a second physical or disk or already ha........

openvz yum problem Centos 6.5 cannot find file on mirror:

#solution Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/openvz.repo For the first two entries comment out #mirrorlist and uncomment #baseurl and then it worked openvz yum problem Centos 6.5 cannot find file on mirror: yum update Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Determining fastest mirrors * openvz-kernel-rhel6: mirrors.ustc.edu.cn * openvz-utils: mirrors.ustc.edu.cn base ........

drbd won't sync 8.3.13 on OpenVZ kernel

I used the matching 8.3.13 utilities and it didn't work but strangely the newer 8.3.16 which makes DRBD complain works just fine. GIT-hash: 83ca112086600faacab2f157bc5a9324f7bd7f77 build by root@sighted, 2012-10-09 12:47:51 0: cs:SyncSource ro:Secondary/Primary ds:UpToDate/Inconsistent A r----- ns:0 nr:0 dw:0 dr:0 al:0 bm:0 lo:0 pe:0 ua:0 ap:0 ep:1 wo:b oos:5236960 &am........

OpenVZ mismatched kernel and dev when compiling.

./configure ./configure: line 91: cd: /lib/modules/2.6.32-042stab084.25/build: No such file or directory Error: kernel version not found. Please make sure your kernel is configured. dr-xr-xr-x. 4 root root 4096 Feb 21 06:13 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 45 Feb 21 06:13 build -> ../../../usr/src/kernels/2.6.32-042stab084.25 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 12 20........

Dell Perc 6/i cannot downgrade

I flashed an LSI Logic firmware to it and it broke the BIOS (cannot do Ctrl+R) for booting purposes but allows other functionality to work normally. I tried downgrading to a Dell firmware for Perc 6i but it won't work, not even with MegaCli wget http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER00416606M/1/SAS-RAID_Firmware_W83M2_LN32_6.3.1-0003_A14.BIN --2013-08-26 12:53:39-- http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER00416606M/1/SAS-RAID_Firmware_W83M2_LN32_6.3.1-0003_A14.BIN Resolvi........

charat in PHP convert non-English characters into code

This is basically URL decoding to the decimal code but nothing in PHPworks how you'd expect it. Here are online tools to verify and check your work, it's important when querying databases with non-English characters: http://yehg.net/encoding/index.php# http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ http://www.codetable.net/decimal/65398 Japanese: http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/bylanguage/japanesechartkatakana.html Charat code for PHP:........

mdadm enable bitmap to speed up rebuilds

Have you ever unplugged the wrong drive and then had to rebuild the entire array? It may not be a big deal in some ways but it does make your system vulnerable until the rebuild is done. Many distros often enable the "bitmap" feature and this basically keeps track of what parts need to be resynced in the case of a temporary removal of a drive from the array, this way it only needs to sync what has changed. To enable bitmap to speed up rebuilds and sync........

postfix how to send to multiple recipients default limit of 1000

The size of the message you are trying to send exceeds a temporary size limit of the server. The message was not sent; try to reduce the message size or wait some time and try again. The server responded: 4.5.3 Error: too many recipients. We set this in main.cf: smtpd_client_recipient_rate_limit=0 We didn't specify it before and the default is said to be 0/unlimited and it still didn't change anything.........

Linux Ubuntu Nvidia GT430 Lockups/Errors/Freezes NVRM: os_schedule: Attempted to yield the CPU while in atomic or interrupt context

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 with Asus NVIDIA GT430 2.6.35-32-generic-pae #65-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 24 14:06:16 UTC 2012 i686 GNU/Linux Nvidia binary driver: 260.19.06 The screen sometimes completely freezes and locks up or everything starts going very slow: [1903398.100007] NVRM: os_schedule: Attempted to yield the CPU while in atomic or interrupt context [1903402.373210] NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 53, CMDre 00000000 00000080 00000000 00000005 00........

iptables block torrents/torrenting

This is a very basic method and won't work in all cases but will reduce the chance of torrenting/abuse by your server users. iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --destination-port 6881:6999 -j REJECT iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --source-port 6881:6999 -j REJECT........

How To Test If Your Hard Drive Is Good/Signs of dying hard drive

I like dd, although it only reads it, usually a read test of the entire disk will uncover if your hard drive is bad in some parts. This is a good thing to do at least once a month, a lot of times bizarre program behavior, laginess and crashing/unnmounting problems etc.. are due to a failing disc and SMART won't know it or indicate a problem: We must also remember there's never a guarantee, I've found that ever since we moved to larger and more platters per drive with 1TB drives........

Kernel/make compilation time and how to improve compile times/compile the Linux kernel faster without hardware upgrades

I thought only a faster CPUand SSDwould help but I already have a Quad-Core CPU and it wasn't being maxed out. The actual tests were performed on an AMD-V enabled 128MB dual core VMWare container though. There is a flag that can be passed to make in order to start multiple threads, by specifying 4 threads I was able to reduce the whole kernel compilation time from scratch by about 50%! (65minutes vs 31minutes!). *Yes I did do a make clean before each co........

Linux High IOWAIT updatedb can't be killed and crash with mdadm

high IO wait 424 root 39 19 1900 848 552 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.91 updatedb root 424 0.0 0.0 1900 848 ? DN Mar11 0:00 /usr/bin/updatedb -f sysfs?rootfs?bdev?proc?cpuset?binfmt_misc?debugfs?sockfs?usbfs?pipefs?anon_inodefs?futexfs?tmpfs?inotifyfs?eventp........

MySQL Replication/Dual-Master vs Clustering

Many people aren't aware but recently Dual-Master Replication setups have become increasingly popular. That's because you get similar features and benefits of having a full-blown cluster (difficult to setup and maintain and requires I believe 3 servers just as controllers). With a dual-master you just have a different off-set for the keys and you should be good, but of course there is the chance that at some point replication will halt because of an unexpected or unforseen error........

updatedb/mdadm caused a kernel panic?

Jan 16 04:02:03 centosbox syslogd 1.4.1: restart. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: INFO: task updatedb:20771 blocked for more than 300 seconds. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: updatedb D F78BE050 6476 20771 20766&n........

mdadm Centos 5 automatic resync

This made me nervous but it's clearly a cronjob based on the messages log that happens every Sunday at about 4:22. I actually can't find any evidence of it in cron.d cron.daily but it is there somewhere obviously. What I don't get is why doesn't this cronjob do a datacheck like Ubuntu's cronscript does? When you unnecessarily rebuild the array you lose your redundancy during that point which makes your data extremely vulnerable. *Update I did a grep of &q........

md: data-check of RAID array md3

This really made me nervous but notice the mdstat says "check". This is because in Ubuntu there is a scheduled mdadm cronscript that runs everyday on Sunday at 00:57 that checks your entire array. This is a good way because it prevents gradual but unnoticed data corruption which Inever thought of. As long as the check completes properly you have peace of mind knowing that your data integretiy is assured and that your hard drives are functioning properly (I'........

Ubuntu/Debian DRBD 8.0 Setup Guide

I've only used it on Centos, soI thought I'd make a quick Debian guide: Install the DRBD Package apt-get install drbd8-utils Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: libswfdec-0.8-0 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following........

Wine stopped working/won't work Solution

After an upgrade wine wouldn't open anything, not even the pre-installed notepad. There are no wine logs and nothing is mentioned in any standard log file about why. I finally decided to run wine from the shell and see what's going on: wine client error:0: version mismatch 398/402. Your wineserver binary was not upgraded correctly, or you have an older one somewhere in your PATH. Or maybe the wrong wineserver is still running?........

Linux Kernel Freeze/Hang during boot on io scheduler cfq registered (default)

You'll see the following and the boot process will freeze: io scheduler noop registered io scheduler anticipatory registered io scheduler deadline registered io scheduler cfq registered (default) I have struggled with this issue on vari........

mencoder Linux CLI video editing how to encode video file into xvid and split by time into multiple parts

Mencoder is great, you can throw anything at it, including video files from your camera and have it encode into xvid or almost any other format. In my case I took 640x480 video from my Canon and reduced the size by 1/3 with the options below (there are many other options that you can read about in the manual but I like to keep it simple). Mencoder Encode mencoder -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts fixed_quant=4 -o ........

MySQL Insert Statement ONLY IF a duplicate entry does not exist

This is a great way to reduce MySQL code/mistakes/annoyance when doing things, take for example this statement: INSERT IGNORE INTO sometable(CatName) VALUES("someitem"); Notice the "IGNORE", that is what does the magic. Normally if the entry "someitem" existed you'd get an error message back such as "Duplicate entry for whatever". What I have normally done in PHP or whatever language is manually coded or made a........

Windows install blue screen of death caused by faulty optical/DVD-RW drive.

I took an educated guess because it kept happening at the same spot when loading the XP install. I thought it was the hard drive or motherboard. But it turns out my heavily used but loved NEC 3500 DVD-RW drive was the culprit. After disconnecting it and swapping it for another much beloved Pioneer DVD-RW, everything has gone smoothly. I never ran into this or many issues because I've hardly used this drive since moving it to another Desktop years ago. I actua........

nginx - the ultimate load balancer

You can find it for free at http://nginx.org/ I find nginx is simpler to setup than pound (it's not hard but I found it unintuitive and annoying), it seemed to make some basic setups overly complicated with the config file syntax. nginx on the other hand is perfectly suited in everyway, it is even simpler to setup and seems to be the most stable and most efficient any load balancer. I would go as far as to say that a good nginx setup is more relia........

Bash Script Info

Bash Script Infohttp://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html#ss10.5 http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~jphb/spos/notes/shell/shell5.html http://quong.best.vwh.net/shellin20/#LtohTOCentry-41 http://www.cactus.org/~dak/shellscript.html http://db.ilug-bom.org.in/Documentation/abs-guide/ http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/unix/bash-tute.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/UnixAndC/Unix/CShellII.html Since bash i........

Load Balancing Tutorial

Load Balancing Tutorialhttp://redundancy.redundancy.org/fbsd_lb.html........

Other Security Web Sites

Other Security Web SitesSeveral websites actively track security issues. This list provides you with the major providers of security information on the Web. Many of these organizations also provide newsletters and mailings to announce changes or security threats: Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) CERIAS is an industry-sponsored center at Purdue University that is focused on technology and relate........

Wireless/xmit power - DD-WRT v23 SP2 (09/15/06) std - build 3932 Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS

I played around with xmit power (how much power in mW) to see if I could increase the range and signal strength. Idon't think this Linksys WRT54G's strength is the wireless, it seems to have poor signal quality and transfer rates all around. Ithink part of the problem is also that there are several wireless networks around my house that could be interfering and the walls are thick here. Anyaway, moving on now :) The default is 28mW and I increased it to........

Adventures in pre-paid SIM Cards and data GPRS/Edge/3G in China with China Mobile in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing and other cities

This really is a difficult and confusing process for non-Mandarin speakers, but here's what I've done and learned so far: You can purchase an "M-Zone" China Mobile pre-paid SIMCard from almost anywhere but I tried to purchase mine from Suning (a large electronics dealer) hoping they would be able to help me or answer my questions but my plan didn't work out at all. At Suning once I found someone who spoke some English they gave me the 55 RMB M-Zone China Mobile P........

Clustered/Distributed Network Filesystems, Which Ones live up to the hype?

I've tried to find a good sensible solution to cluster with and each technology has it's pros and cons and there is no perfect solution and I've found a lot of "exaggerations" in the applications, benefits and performance of these different filesystems. DRBD I first started off with DRBD and Ihave to say it does live up to the hype, is quite reliable (although it can be annoying to match up the kernel module and user applications since they must match and whe........

MySQL Restoring And Dumping/Backing UP MySQL Data/Tables/Databases

Backing MySQL Databases Backing Up/Dumping All Mysql Databases To A Single File mysqldump --all-databases -u admin -p > allmysqldatabases.sql The "-all-databases" clause is pretty obvious isn't it? It means that it will backup all databases. The "-u admin" means login using the user "admin", if you h........

iPhone 3GS 32GB "Harsh Review"

Yes, Iadmit I finally got bitten by the hype as much as I can usually see through it all. Keep in mind this review is of the "stock" phone, no jailbreaking yet which is what really unleashes the customizability and whyI bought iPhone. I had better things to say about this phone before buying it, and it is a great phone, perhaps the best on the market by far, if not because of the Mac OS port onto the iPhone and all the apps, etc, etc. With that said........

1U Servers are Loud - We Have The Quiet Solution

I've read a lot of people complaining that their 1U servers are too loud for the office, home or whatever strange places people might want to put them. Whenever Isee the question asked, "what can be done about the noise", you'll see a myriad of silly answers like "you shouldn't have it at home or in your office at all", "1U servers are meant to be loud". These all might be valid points but they're not the solution. A good example is a........

Rackable Systems and their Microslice Clustered 1U Servers

Ithink there has been a lot of negative press towards Rackable Systems. We will give their new solution credit that it is marketed very well, and comes prepackaged and ready to go. But let's cut through the hype of both sides, the people who love this concept and the people who hate it. What Rackable Systems have done is a first, to minimize space, power and costs into small servers. This is great, and many companies have already built their own servers based........