Category Archives: system administration
Using scrub to destroy a hard drive
Recently I had a hard drive failure that pushed me into getting a little NAS device that I could back up to S3 easily. After consolidating a lot of data to the NAS I was left with a few old hard drives that I needed to do something with as well as some existing hard [...]
Installing Windows 7 on VirtualBox
I have been seeing people talk about the Windows 7 Beta being available to download so I went to see how hard it was to sign up. It turns out that it actually pretty easy so I decided I would give it a try under VirtualBox just to see if it would work. The following [...]
How to transfer a Linux image from VirtualBox to Xen
There have been times recently when I wanted to pull a VirtualBox Linux instance I had into Xen. I kept thinking it had to be fairly easy but I kept putting off trying it until recently when I ran into something I wanted to install from a CD image into an Amazon EC2 AMI. It [...]
Automounting Amazon EBS volumes on EC2 instances
I've been using S3 to store semi-transient information like log files from EC2 nodes in the past but recently decided to give Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS) a try instead. I quickly realized a downside to using EBS in that there is no mechanism for auto-attach and mounting volumes when an AMI is launched. This [...]
Upgrading from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 with yum
Fedora 10 is out and once again it is time to upgrade. The upgrade from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 is almost exactly like the upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. Here are the steps you need to do the upgrade from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10.
Also posted in linux 10 Comments
PowerDNS Makes Custom DNS Backends Easy
I ran into PowerDNS recently when I needed to find a DNS server that would allow me to produce custom responses to domain queries. I needed to have a request for a DNS entry return a different IP depending on some factors in a database and I needed that data to always be accurate (not [...]
Also posted in java, linux, software, utilities Leave a comment
FreeRADIUS with Oracle
I recently needed to find a RADIUS server for use in a project where I could stick profile data into Oracle. I remembered seeing FreeRADIUS a while back so I checked to see if it was active and supported Oracle. Sure enough it did. It was a little tricky to set up because some of [...]
Upgrading from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 with yum
A new release of Fedora is out again so it is time to check out the upgrade. This time it is the Fedora 9 release. The upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 is almost exactly like the upgrade to Fedora 8. Here are the steps you need to do the upgrade from Fedora 8 [...]
Also posted in linux 34 Comments
Examples of why netcat is still useful
I recently got a new work PC and was worried that stuck somewhere in the 40G hard drive of the old PC was something I would one day need. The new PC had 300G of space so I figured I would just copy the entire drive over and keep it forever. This isn't the most [...]
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Running Asterisk in the cloud with Amazon EC2