This week's TechMail is about one of my favourite programs, runit: Use runit to supervise Linux services. I can't recommend runit highly enough, but ever since I started with qmail years ago and djb's daemontools, supervised services have been a bit of a thing for me. Can't live without them …

Last week's TechMail tip was Learn to use the openssl command-line program which goes into the use of... openssl... on the command-line. Stuff like generating hashes, doing general file encryption, etc.

And this week's TechMail is Try IRC with Irssi to communicate via chat, which essentially looks at irssi being the superior IRC client to anything else you can find out there. Couple screen, irssi, and mutt and you've essentially got my "command center" on any desktop/laptop. Long live the …

Been busy redoing my office this week and was busy with Mandriva release stuff last week so I forgot to put up the new TechMails. Last week's techmail was Using vi key bindings in bash and zsh, which looks at using, you guessed it, vi keybindings instead of the default …

Well, I'm no longer a virgin to the Mandriva build system. I've been using some tools, like iurt, on the secteam buildbox for a while now, but I've not had the need to use repsys or mdvsys. So I started playing with them yesterday. For starters, someone needs to make …

Saw a few others on Planet Mandriva doing this so I figured what the heck, I'd do the same. I don' t use bash tho, I use zsh and on one box I have the extended history saved (timestamps), and the other I don't. Also keep in mind that I …

Just got my hands on a new updates build server. It's a quad-core xeon 2.13GHz with 8GB RAM. To put things into perspective, this machine will replace 3 different machines eventually... one to do the administrative stuff (AMD Athlon64 2.2GHz w/ 2GB RAM), one to build 32bit updates …

Well, it's official: Mandriva 2008.1 is now out and available. Time to start gearing up for the barrage of bugfix updates. =) On a similar note, 2007.0 is almost EOL.. you've got a few days left to upgrade to something newer before being left without security updates. April 13 …

Last week's TechMail was Securely delete files with shred, a quick introduction to the shred tool in order to securely delete files on a Linux box.

This week's TechMail is Use command-line MySQL for additional flexibility which delves into some quickie commands useful on the MySQL CLI client, such as setting prompts, using mysql output in scripts, etc.