Category: System Administration

  • Databases for simple web development

    I have log been a fan of PostgreSQL over MySQL, believe that PostgreSQL is more feature complete and generally as fast or faster, with obvious caveats about being used appropriately, of course, and not to mention no real comparative testing. Every body gets to have an untested opinion, right? I did end up doing some…

  • Making Miro work with USB sound devices on Ubuntu

    On Ubuntu (and possibly other linux distributions) Miro refuses to work with a secondary sound card, it will only work with the primary one despite what the ALSA default is set to, unlike most programs which offer some way to override the default. Potentially, the second sound card in question could be a PCI card…

  • A few Solaris 10 notes

    Actually, these are primarily Solaris 11 notes, but they will probably all apply to Solaris 10 when the next release comes out, which I understand to be scheduled for sometime later this month. First, recently a lot of SCSI hard drives I’ve gotten have been a little mysterious about being used by the Solaris installer…

  • Flash on Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64

    I run Ubuntu 8.04 AM64 on a laptop at work.  I’ve been doing this since Ubuntu 6.10.  This has not been a smooth ride. Ubuntu 6.10 i386 on my old laptop (I only “upgraded” because the old one was stolen from the plane on a busines trip) worked flawlessly for me.  Things have gotten a…

  • About ReferURL

    ReferURL.net is a link shorting service I created. You paste in a long URL (say to an eBay auction or newpaper article) and it gives you a short URL to use (http://referurl.net/123). You also have the option of picking an alias for a referurl, something like http://referurl.net/r/xxx. Also, a common usage pattern is a bookmarklet…

  • SunPCI on Solaris 9

    I just imported this page because I don’t want to forget the information. If you don’t know why you need to read this, then feel free to ignore it. About The SunPCI is a 400mhz AMD k62 card for running Windows in a PCI Sun. Never versions of the card are the SunPCI-II and the…

  • Mail Configuration with Postfix and Dovecot

    (NOTE in 2011: This one post attracts enormous amounts of spam comments, so I’m closing comments on it, while still leaving comments on elsewhere.) Notes on configuring a SMTP/IMAP server with TLS, SSL, and SMTP AUTH, the least pain possible. The platform used was Solaris 10 with SunStudio 11. The notes should apply to any…

  • PostgreSQL Notes

    I don’t use Postgres quite heavily enough to remeber how to do certain administrative tasks. Having gotten sick of flipping back and forth between various sections in the manual, I’m making a page of notes here. Anything here is probably permenantly burned in the brains of heavier users, but perhaps this will be useful to…