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About a year ago, I was introduced to the joys of using irssi and screen to access irc servers.

Thanks to a recommendation from [Michael][1] and [Florian][2], I’ve been using [dsh][3] with a lot of success for quite some time.

One of my favorite (and most used) applications on any Linux machine is screen.

Happy New Year!

I try to keep up with the latest kernel update from kernel.

As with the Fedora 10 to 11 upgrade, you can upgrade Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 using yum.

Edit: After further research, I found that this fix only adjusts the speed at which your mouse moves.

If you want your iptables rules automatically loaded every time your networking comes up on your Debian or Ubuntu server, you can follow these easy steps.

I usually set the time zone on my servers to UTC, but that makes it a bit confusing for me when I use irssi.

Running OS X 10.

If you use Fedora 11 in a virtualized environment, you may have seen this error recently if you’ve updated to apr-1.

On some systems, getting the mysql gem to build can be a little tricky.

If you haven’t checked out bgplay, it’s pretty handy.

There are a ton of places on the internet where you can check the public-facing IP for the device you are using.

I found a great post on Overstimulate about handling the rotation of rails logs when you use Phusion Passenger.

Occasionally, I’ll end up with a mailbox full of random data, alerts, or other useless things.

The best uses I’ve found for the SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals are times when a process goes haywire, or when a script spawns too many processes at once.

There are two main ways to upgrade Fedora 10 (Cambridge) to Fedora 11 (Leonidas):

Sometimes we find ourselves in places where we don’t trust the network that we’re using.

I found a really helpful tip on Xaprb for comparing result sets in MySQL:

Servers with hot swappable drive bays are always handy.

If you have a centralized syslog server, or you use Splunk for log tracking, you may find the need to get older log files into a syslog port on that server.

Users of PHPMyAdmin 3.

Mac users feel a little left out when it comes to VMWare Server clients.

Setting up new servers can be a pain if you’re not able to clone them from a server that is known to be working.

I recently tossed Ubuntu 8.

I’ve tested this Debian etch to lenny upgrade process a few times so far, and it seems to be working well.

Most linux distributions use some type of mechanism to gracefully stop daemons and unmount storage volumes during a reboot or shutdown.

I set up a system at home that has two SATA controllers: one is on the motherboard (nvidia chipset), while the other is on a Silicon Image SATA card that has three eSATA ports.

Some of you may be wondering “why would you want to use Rails without a database?

I enjoy using CPAN because it installs Perl modules with a simple interface, fetches dependencies, and warns you when things are about to end badly.

When it comes to frustrating parts of the Linux kernel, OOM killer takes the cake.

You can use the simple but powerful xinetd on your Linux server to monitor almost anything on the server.

If you have Excel files that need to be imported into MySQL, you can import them easily with PHP.

If you have a Plesk server where short mail names are enabled, upgrading to Plesk 8.

I stumbled into this four line ruby script that will serve up all of the rdoc documentation for your server’s currently installed gems:

After running sar on my new slice from SliceHost*, I noticed a new column called steal.

I know I usually talk about Linux server related topics on this blog, but I’m pretty proud of what I’ve figured out this morning on my Mac.

Although the idea of putting something from Microsoft on a Linux box might sound awful at first, you may find a reason to use Microsoft TrueType fonts on a Linux server.

I found a server last week that was having severe issues with disk I/O to the point where most operations were taking many minutes to complete.

After working with some RHEL 5 servers fairly regularly, I noticed a reduction in Apache 2.

Most web developers expend a lot of energy optimizing queries, reducing the overhead of functions, and streamlining their application’s overall flow.

I found a Plesk 8.

For a recent project, I needed to automatically provision VM’s for testing.

I was working with a CentOS 5 x86_64 installation running VMWare server last week when I stumbled upon this error:

I spoke with a customer last week who was curious about enabling encrypted partitions on a DAS connected to their server.

I’ve used this extremely basic procmail configuration a million times, and it’s a great start for any server configuration.

If you have Plesk 8.

Many applications that are used on a standard server perform quite a few of small writes to the disk (like MySQL or Apache).

Before you follow this guide, be sure to read about the issue I had in Fedora 12 with this strategy.