http://toki.co.nz/linux/ yet another blog BlazeBlogger 1.0.0 http://toki.co.nz/linux/2012/04/12-new-linux-toy/ I've just gone and got myself another Linux based toy :-) Yup, I now have in my possession a shiny new Nokia N9! I ummd and ahhd about it for quite some time - I know it's been effectively cut loose by Nokia, I know that Nokia's share price is so low right now that they are in danger of completely collapsing (though I note that the N9 is one of the phones that kept them afloat - it has been amazingly well received everywhere it was actually launched). I am well aware that I'm buying into yet an Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2012/02/11-another-linux-workstation/ My trusty old Apple PowerBook is now running Debian. I've recorded the tweaks needed to make everything work here. Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2012/02/10-nginx/ I've just switched this site over to Nginx from Apache. The main reason for doing this is Nginx is far better suited to lightweight sites like this as it is especially fast at serving static content while using a lot less ram and seeing as I'm not doing any fancy URL re-writing or other things like that Apache was a bit overkill. The reason I went with Apache in the first place when I first started this site a few years ago was simply it was what I was used to - all the web servers I've configu Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2012/02/9-ubuntu-1110/ And I'm back to using a Linux workstation 3 I've recently switched jobs, leaving the telco for a web hosting outfit. In my new workplace we can choose which OS we want to use on our workstations (or even provide our own workstations - a bunch of guys are running Macs, the rest pretty evenly split between Win 7 and Linux) and I'm happily running Ubuntu 11.10 on my nice dual 22" screen rig. Well, when I say happily it's nearly all rosy - I can't say I'm thrilled with Unity. It's not that the conc Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2011/11/8-tweaking-vim/ Well it's only taken me about 5 years but I've finally discovered the spell plugin for vim. Seeing as I use vim to blog with and my spelling is terrible (hey, I'm a child of the spell-checker-on-phone generation!) I thought I'd install the plugin and give it a whirl - suffice to say pretty much every entry on this blog had at least one typo/spelling error! Hopefully from now on you'll notice fewer spelling errors going forward :-) Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2011/09/7-nagios/ I've now got a full Nagios build running at home, monitoring various systems (my ADSL router, the bare metal Xen host, all the guests, my NAS etc) in my house. I originally installed it simply so I could check when updates were available for the Debian systems I have running here (rather than having to apt-get update manually to check) by using snmp coupled with a script that checks every night for updates but soon got carried away and now I'm monitoring and graphing (with cacti) a whole bunch Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2011/08/6-apache-bug/ I was just reading about this vulnerability in Apache (the web server that pretty much owns the internet). Quite nasty, a single machine can crash a web server with a simple http request. The Apache guys are scrambling for a fix which should be out in the next few days but until then there are a bunch of things you can do to mitigate the bug. Guess which web server I'm running on this box... gulp! UPDATE: And it's fixed - go get your apt-get update on. Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2011/05/5-back-to-windows/ I've lost my Linux workstation sob! sniff! and I'm now forced to use a company build of Windows XP. This came about because I've shifted internally to a new roll at work and they don't allow anything other than the company's build of WinXP on their network (and yes, Windows XP is just as bad as I remember it from years ago...) I'm currently getting my Linux fix (other than the servers I work on for a living of course!) by ssh'ing into my little Intel Atom server at home and running irssi to con Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2011/04/4-read-the-instructions/ Just got completely schooled by a xen upgrade - the XEN kernel got upgraded from 2.6.26 to 2.6.32 on squeeze and the device naming changed in the process. When I first upgraded to squeeze I was still booting the guests using the old kernel, but decided the time had come to get them onto the latest and greatest. So I shut down this web server guest, mounted the drive on the bare metal and copied the kernel module tree across, tweaked the guest XEN config to use the new kernel and initrd and fire Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:01 GMT http://toki.co.nz/linux/2011/02/3-new-toys/ So many shiny new things out today! Just installed Chrome 9 and I've gotta say I like it a lot. The biggest thing stopping me from using it in the past has been the terrible performance of animated gifs (a problem that seems to effect all WebKit based browsers). I know, I know... Animated gifs are the scourge of the web but unfortunately on one of the forums I frequent a lot of users have animated gifs as their avatars and opening a page full of them used to stall the browser for up to 30 secon Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:01 GMT