Category: System Administration

  • HTPC

    Back in September, I posted about evaluating an Intel D510MO board for HTPC applications, and determined that it wasn’t good enough. Now, I am trying again with an Atom 330 / ION motherboard. This is a slower CPU, but a faster Nvida graphics chipset. Last September it still wouldn’t have done the job, but as…

  • How I Setup Ubuntu 10.10

    I’ve found myself doing this 3 times in the last month. I thought I would write up what I do so that I don’t have to try to remember the next time I need to do this (which probably won’t be all that soon). First, I do a basic install from the live CD. Then…

  • πp-v2, the new Plan 9 file protocol

    The symbol is Pi. I point that out since it doesn’t render very nicely in my web browser. The URL for the paper is: http://proness.kix.in/misc/%CF%80p-v2.pdf Yes, they stuck the symbol into the file name as well. Plan9 people seem to like to do such things just because they invented UTF-8 and were the first to…

  • Oops

    All the pictures in old entries are missing, and it seems that it is because a pictures folder was removed.  Now looking for a backup.  And this time perhaps I should let WordPress keep track of them instead of making my own image folder. And now it should be fixed, so please let me know…

  • Using rxvt with [Open]Solaris.

    After years of hard coding TERM to xterm or vt100 in .bashrc to get around rxvt incompatibility, I finally found this: sudo cp /usr/gnu/lib/terminfo/r/rxvt /usr/share/lib/terminfo/r/rxvt I suppose I really should use pfexec instead of sudo, but mastering that is a job for another month.

  • OpenSolaris on the Intel D510MO Atom

    I wanted to tryOpenSolaris on the new Atom board on a seperate disk before the machine got settled into normal use (normal use covered in this post). First impression, the LiveCD booted and worked correctly including graphics in VESA mode and the networking. The install was simple and painless, and afterwards came right up with…

  • Zones on a single server

    A few months ago my co-located Solaris server was hit by a root kit that setup a IRC bot. It appeared that it got it by attacking one of the off the shelf web apps I use. To prevent having to do a complete rebuild in the future if this happens again, I decided to…

  • Setting up a jumpstart server for Solaris Express.

    I guess this post will have a somewhat limited life span since Solaris Express is being retired in favor of OpenSolaris. However, some of the pages I always refereed to every time I needed to do this have disappeared, so I’m writing it up again anyway for future reference. Maybe I’ll update it again when…

  • PostgreSQL connection pooling for mod_php

    In a quest for better performance with postgres, I’ve been looking for connection pooling tools. There are a few quirks that I tend to require be met. First, it must run on Solaris. This isn’t so much a quirk, since the server runs Solaris and is SPARC hardware, and I’m not going to install a…

  • How to reset a wordpress user password via SQL.

    I found I had forgotten an admin password on a WordPress site I run. After figuring out how to reset it, I thought I would stick it here so that I can find it myself again in the future. UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass=MD5(‘secret_password_here’) WHERE user_login = ‘yourself’;