Last week's techmail was Set up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux server which takes you through the necessary steps of setting up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux box. I use Dropbox here for keeping certain files in sync between systems, but I also am connected to a secondary Dropbox to …

This week's techmail was Firewall configuration with system-config-firewall which discusses the niceties of using Fedora's system-config-firewall to configure iptables. I'm not much of a GUI guy, but the interface for the firewall configuration is really slick. Will it replace my use of editing iptables rules in /etc/sysconfig/iptables? Probably …

This week's techmail was Managing MySQL with MySQL Workbench. I've always been a CLI guy when it comes to MySQL (as with most things: mutt, irssi, etc.), and when I needed something GUIrific I went with phpMyAdmin. However, I've looked at MySQL Workbench and I like what I'm seeing. The …

This week's techmail is Work on remote Subversion repositories locally with Git which talks about using Git locally to interface with a remote (or local, even) subversion repository. Involved in a project that uses Subversion as their version control system, but prefer to use Git? No problem. The svn-git plugin …

This week's techmail is System monitoring with Zenoss takes complexity out of configuration (not quite sure why my original title got changed, as this one doesn't make much sense to me, but ok...). Anyways, I've been a long-time fan of Nagios, still use it, but I'm seriously considering replacing it …

Last week's techmail was Using rsnapshot to back up and retain snapshots. Rsnapshot is pretty slick; the tip goes into the how and the why, but now that I've found this thing I think it's going to replace my home-brew rsync backup solution. I use subversion to retain old backups …

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I maintain a repository of packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (arguably these could/should be in EPEL but I've not had time to get into the Fedora side of things as of yet... someone will beat me with a wet noodle …

This week's techmail is Setting the record straight on sudo which I wrote as a rebuttal to another, rather ignorant, rant against the use of sudo. I get it, the author uses Ubuntu and probably doesn't give much thought to the fact that Ubuntu really shouldn't use sudo the way …

This week's techmail is Using smartctl to get SMART status information on your hard drives. Smartctl is awesome, and having it monitor your drives on a constant basis will likely give you the early warning "oh crap, something is wrong, backup NOW!" that people can really use. I know it's …

This week's TechMail is Replace a failed drive in Linux RAID which goes into the fun I had on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago replacing a drive in my backup box at my mother's place. All-in-all it was dead simple and very painless, which just goes to show …