Finally a graphics card for Linux that works flawlessly with compiz and is lightning fast
After years of struggling and looking around, I have finally found a graphics card that works flawlessly when running compiz under Linux and that processes all the effects at lightning speed. I've never seen something like this for that reasonable price!
Testing out Funtoo
The other day I decided to give a try at Funtoo (for those that do not know it yet, a variant of Gentoo). I am very impressed with the improvements that Daniel Robbins has done so far.
Among the things that I like:
Today it’s the Greek Independence Day and tomorrow I will start my vacation from work
The first modern Greek state was founded 189 years ago. After suffering massive oppression and several massacres under the Ottoman empire, the Greek population revolted and freed themselves from their oppressors.
Nowadays, Greece is fighting against different kind of oppression, the oppression of speculators, of extremely wealthy people that only care about growing their fortunes and do not care at all for the vast majority of the population. These shameless people are to be blamed for the world wide crises, for the wars around the planet and for the many unfair activities that people end up suffering.
How to be able to use your ssh agent forwarding after using sudo
Recently we have hit with a solution for an issue where we wanted our users to run certain secure commands as root, which included repository commits. This can easily happen to you if you use savon, for instance.
Because of the nature of savon, given that it understands not only about standard permissions and modes, but also of SELinux contexts, this tool can only be used properly as root, if you want to use all of its features.
The problem comes when you need non-root users, that work with certain files in a directory, to be able to commit these changes. You have to use sudo, which you surely already know. For increased security, standard distributions drop most environment variables when you run a command with sudo.
Check that a physical link is up with the proper speed
This check is great to detect when a network cable for whatever reason deteriorates and stops providing the desired up-link speed. It works perfectly for any system that has ethtool installed.
This particular check has helped me as a sysadmin to detect bad quality cables that, after being reused many times, end up deteriorating and do not let me get 1Gbps in RJ-45 CAT 5E cables. I have also been able to detect network card failures, and also malfunctioning switch ports.
Check that an FTP account is fully working
This script uses lftp, a sophisticated ftp/http client, to check not only that a give FTP account is accessible, but that it is also able to list files and directories, to get and put files and to delete files. This simple script is fast, easy to configure, flexible and can be extended easily.
Sometimes, things like SELinux, a failed network mount point or wrong permissions cause an FTP account to not work properly. With this check, you will be able to detect it immediately.
Check that any network filesystem partition is correctly mounted
A colleague of mine, Thomas Blanchin, has improved my glusterfs mounted nagios check so that it works properly with any network file system. It generates the proper output and can be used for any network file system without much trouble.
Puppetcamp Europe 2010
According to this information, Reductive Labs, the team behind puppet, has announced that Puppetcamp Europe 2010 will happen on 27 and 28 May 2010 in Ghent, Belgium. For those who do not know, Puppet is an open source application for system control automation.
Releasing cached memory in Linux
Under normal circumstances, modern Linux systems try to cache into memory disk data that is accessed often. Sometimes, we have that much memory in the system that our kernel keeps filling up the memory by caching every piece of data we access.
Other times, because of the swappiness factor, active data finds its way into the swap instead of the main memory. I have seen this behavior in a few systems hosting databases, specially running mysql, and it is a serious performance hazard.
In order to fix systems like this, we need to fix the swappiness, drop the caches and, swapoff and swapon the system swap.