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WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Hardening Guide for phpList
WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
Why I was banned from GrapheneOS by Daniel Micay
Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
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Michael Altfield's gravatar

*Cheap*, Redundant, Multi-TB, Storage Solution

Storage is getting so cheap these days. So cheap, in fact, that multi-terabyte home servers are now economically feasible.

The emergence of cheap 1 terabye hard drives and ZFS perfectly compliment each other. Like others, I’ve embraced these two technologies to build myself a redundant, multi-TB disk array with 3x1TB drives running in a RAIDZ on OpenSolaris for about $300.


. . . → Read More: *Cheap*, Redundant, Multi-TB, Storage Solution

Michael Altfield's gravatar

Install “build-essential” on RHEL/CentOS and OpenSolaris

Debian

If you want to be able to compile packages in debain/ubunutu, you can issue the following command:

apt-get install build-essential

 

Red Hat

If you want to be able to compile packages in red hat/centos, you can issue the following command:

yum install make gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel

…or, if you don’t care about maintaining a small footprint, you can get *all* of the development packages (including X devs–eww):

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

 

Open Solaris

If you want to be able to compile packages in open solaris, you can issue the following command:

pkg install SUNWgcc

Michael Altfield's gravatar

Clone Xen RHEL5 (CentOS 5.2) VM

Hello world! I just updated my whole server environment and, my, things are looking good. Anyway, I had to run through these steps a half dozen times, so I thought I would post it here for myself and (maybe even) others.

Here’s the commands I ran to turn a clone of my base RHEL5 (CentOS 5.2) Xen image into another working virtual machine on my RHEL5 (CentoOS 5.2) Xen Host:

Michael Altfield's gravatar

Sabayon, KDE, and Evolution

I recently reformatted my hard drive–switching from pure Gentoo to the Sabayon fork. Sabayon did for Gentoo what Ubuntu did for Debian. It’s generally a lot easier to use, but–unlike Ubuntu–it doesn’t sacrifice functionality for ease-of-use.


. . . → Read More: Sabayon, KDE, and Evolution

Michael Altfield's gravatar

HP tx1000z dies–not suprisingly

Well, my HP tx1000z tablet laptop died today. Turns out that it’s due to an overheating defective nvida GPU.


. . . → Read More: HP tx1000z dies–not suprisingly

Michael Altfield's gravatar

kmhssoccer.org Update

To a degree, I still actively work on my high school soccer team’s website (which I created back in 2005). I started working on it on and off since summer 2008, and 71 hours of development later, I finally pushed my changes to the live server in January 2009.


. . . → Read More: kmhssoccer.org Update

Michael Altfield's gravatar

New GPG Key

I went to send an email the other day and I was halted when I discovered that my key had expired. I can’t believe that I’ve been using GPG for 6 months, but the time had come to generate a new keypair.

This post outlines the process to gererate a new keypair once your old keypair has expired.


. . . → Read More: New GPG Key

Michael Altfield's gravatar

Resolved: OpenVPN

Jesus. It’s only the second week of school and I’ve already pulled my first all-nighter. This time, however, it was not for school. I was determined to get my OpenVPN server properly setup so that I could finally browse the web securely from the dorms. I only expected this to take a few minutes, but I ended up spending over 7 hours of research, troubleshooting, and configuration changes.

This post will contain a slew of information about smoothwall, zerina, openvpn, and iptables. I’m mostly just going to throw all of my findings here without much of any logical flow.


. . . → Read More: Resolved: OpenVPN

Michael Altfield's gravatar

Smoothwall Update

A few weeks ago, I finally got around to downloading and installing 4 updates to my smoothwall box. Unlike Ubuntu upgrades, this process was farily painless except for one thing: my Zerina OpenVPN ‘plugin’ broke.


. . . → Read More: Smoothwall Update

Michael Altfield's gravatar

xpdf Supremacy

In Ubuntu–and most gnome-based linux distributions, for that matter–the default PDF viewer is Evince Document Viewer. However, a much better alternative PDF viewer exists: xpdf

In my experience, xpdf uses only about 5% as much RAM as evince!


. . . → Read More: xpdf Supremacy