Category Archives: Linux

Randomized .signature file

Here’s a quicky. I like to have a random quote in my signature, but most mail clients only read a static file, and trying to fool them with a command pipe socket is tricky, and often has other issues. So I wrote this little bit of magic: #!/usr/bin/perl   my $fortune = ”;   do [...]

CakePHP mod_rewrite optimization

CakePHP is great, but the default installation has a performance issue that is very easy to resolve, and should be fixed in any production installation of a CakePHP application. The solution is very simple. In the default install, there is a file in the webroot called .htaccess. It contains mod_rewrite rules, and you have to [...]

Gnome still wins

One of my friends convinced me to try out KDE again. I’ve never been real settled on a window manager for Linux, alternating between Gnome, KDE, and other random ‘lightweight’ WMs. But, I figured I’d give KDE another shot since I’ve been with Gnome for a while. Unfortunately, KDE 4.1 and 4.2 have definately failed [...]

The Importance Of Backups

As you probably didn’t notice, given that I don’t think anyone reads my blog… my server has been having issues over the last several days. The saga started on Sunday evening, when I got a call from the server owner that it had locked up. It had done this before on rare occasion, and previously, had just required a quick reboot to get things back in order.

So, we trekked over to the data center, and I hooked up a monitor and keyboard, and rebooted the machine. I was watching the boot messages, when I saw this message:

RAID Array Status: DEGRADED