My blog_title_here

Hardware

I'd say "every sufficiently advanced user is indistinguishable from a sysadmin" (yes, it's a play on famous Arthur C Clarke's quote), and it doesn't take much of "advanced" to come to a home-server idea.
And I bet the main purpose for most of these aren't playground, p2p client or some http/ftp server - it's just a storage. Serving and updating the ...

Guess being a long user of stuff like OpenSSH, iproute2 and VDE rots your brain - you start thinking that building any sort of tunnel is a bliss. Well, it's not. At least not "any sort".

This day I've dedicated to set up some basic IPSec tunnel and at first that seemed an easy task - it's long ago in kernel (kame implementation, and it's not ...

There's one great app - bournal ("when nobody cares what you have to say!"). Essentialy it's a bash script, providing a simple interface to edit and encrypt journal entries.
Idea behind it is quite opposite of blogging - keep your thoughts as far away from everyone as possible. I've used the app for quite a while, ever since I've noticed it among freshmeat release announcements. It ...

If you're downloading stuff off the 'net via bt like me, then TPB is probably quite a familiar place to you.

Ever since the '09 trial there were a problems with TPB trackers (tracker.thepiratebay.org) - the name gets inserted into every .torrent yet it points to 127.0.0.1.
Lately, TPB offshot, tracker.openbittorrent.com suffers from the same problem and actually there's a ...

Just couldn't get past this article without linking it. Guess it just scares the shit out of me, painting very grim and horribly real picture.

I see web as a lifeblood of the internet (torrents probably being the bowel contents), and the internet itself as an ultimate source of entropy for the progress.

Where were people before web 2.0? Dreaming about aliens and robots in their ...

From time to time I accidentally bump into new releases from the artists/bands I listen to. Usually it happens on the web, since I don't like random radio selections much, and quite a wide variety of stuff I like seem to ensure that my last.fm radio is a mess.
So, after accidentally seeing a few new albums for my collection, I've decided to remedy ...

So far I like exherbo way of package management and base system layout.
I haven't migrated my desktop environment to it yet, but I expect it shouldn't be a problem, since I don't mind porting all the stuff I need either from gentoo or writing exheres for all I need from scratch.

First challenge I've faced though was due to my late addiction to ...

While I'm on a vacation, I've decided to try out new distro I've been meaning to for quite awhile - exherbo.
Mostly it's the same source-based gentoo-linux derivative, yet it's not cloned from gentoo, like funtoo or sabayon, but built from scratch by the guys who've seen gentoo and it's core concepts (like portage or baselayout) as quite a stagnant thing. While ...

I'm a happy git user for several years now, and the best thing about it is that I've learned how VCS-es, and git in particular, work under the hood.
It expanded (and in most aspects probably formed) my view on the time-series data storage - very useful knowledge for wide range of purposes from log or configuration storage to snapshotting, backups and filesystem synchronisation. Another similar revelation ...

Last month I've been busy setting up a monitoring system at work.
Mostly it's the graphs with dynamic data like cpu/mem/io/net loads and application-specific stats (which I'll probably get around to describing sometime later), for which there is a nice RRD solutions (I've used cacti + snmpd + my python extensions + pyrrd + rrdtool directly), but there was also one specific task of setting ...