I spent the last month taking a break from Open Source, partly due to FreeBSD 7.1 failing to hit the FTP servers as scheduled (any excuse), but mostly due to Santa’s early delivery of Ableton Live. Not really Open Source I may add but extremely cool nonetheless and a much needed break from coding!.

I find that staring too much at code can hamper the creative process (hehe), and as you know Creativity and Innovation go hand in hand with Open Source Software!.

Speaking of which, while I have been busy playing with waveforms and elastic audio, the Open Source world has been all guns blazing with cool releases like MySQL 5.1 GA, …

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …

If you are security conscious and nowadays who isn’t?, you may have pondered over ways to make your external SSH connection safer.
Of course there’s always One-time Passwords and Public Keys, but if like me you watch the daily barrage of brute force attacks you may be thinking it’s only a matter of time…

That’s what I was thinking at about the same time an SMS arrived on my mobile….then it hit me….I take my mobile everywhere, if only my server could call me and ask if it is really me trying to log in.

My first instinct was to try and insert a Perl or Python script into the login process. After all …

Issue Five of MySQL Magazine just came out and it included the results from its Annual MySQL Usage Survey. Among a bunch of other cool information, it asked the question: “What is your favorite blog?” (Q26). The results were as follows:

The first interesting thing that I noticed was that the #1 [...]

I read a lot about MySQL backups using LVM Snapshots on Linux, WAFL Snapshots on NetApp and more recently ZFS Snapshots. But did you know you can do the same under FreeBSD?

FreeBSD has had snapshot capability since around 2001 allowing administrators to take a frozen image of a filesystem at a given instant in time with minimal impact on the server / filesystem. So how does …

Whenever I decide to take a holiday I can usually guarantee that something cool will occur in the IT industry in my absence.

Now this holiday has been slightly different in many ways. I had to cancel my flight due to a sudden onset of Vertigo 1 day before I was supposed to fly. If like me you have never experienced Vertigo before, thank yourself lucky!. Having no sense of balance and intense room spin whenever you open your eyes is no fun at all, it took at least 2 days for me to stop being sick.

Having been able to actually use my laptop in the last couple of days I notice that the “cool thing” I usually miss on holiday turns out to be big trouble all over OpenSourceVille, the majority of which seems to revolve around licensing and intellectual property.

Who could miss the BSD vs GPL debate that I’m sure will rage for a long time after …

• alias skedit='open -a skEdit' is highly useful. Now I can do skedit foo.php and it opens it up. What joy with such simple things.
• Great to see Mono go into Rawhide, meaning FC5 Test 2 will have it. Now I can’t hardly wait. On PPC, if we had Xen working (upstream), life would be the ultimate breeze.
• I will not be making it to linux.conf.au 2006 in New Zealand. Despite all good attempts to get a flight leaving KL, I can’t. Well, affordably (hello coach class). Registrations however are still open. There’s a Red Hat/Fedora meetup, and Joshua Wulf would be a useful person to contact if you’re rocking up for it (email discussion still has dates
• Is there a reason Fedora disabled updatedb running by default? Now users actually need to specify yes, in /etc/updatedb.conf. Why? Was this for laptop users?
• FreeBSD ports has this nice advantage that …

Came across an article today linked to off the FreeBSD site that had some particular interest to me. I've had a lot of people tell me that Linux works better for database because of its supported filesystems. Well not for much longer!

"New performance improvements in FreeBSD 6 will take advantage of the new SMP architecture. It will also have the ability to scale to eight, 12, and 14 processors. The filesystem is now multithreaded, which, according to Long, will allow for much better performance of mail servers and database servers."

Which is awesome to hear, better SMP support and multithreaded file systems! FreeBSD community never ceases to amaze me. The article also talked about some neat features coming in the new version of OpenBSD which should make it an even better platform for BSD based router / firewall.

the full article can be found here: …

Came across an article today linked to off the FreeBSD site that had some particular interest to me. I've had a lot of people tell me that Linux works better for database because of its supported filesystems. Well not for much longer!

"New performance improvements in FreeBSD 6 will take advantage of the new SMP architecture. It will also have the ability to scale to eight, 12, and 14 processors. The filesystem is now multithreaded, which, according to Long, will allow for much better performance of mail servers and database servers."

Which is awesome to hear, better SMP support and multithreaded file systems! FreeBSD community never ceases to amaze me. The article also talked about some neat features coming in the new version of OpenBSD which should make it an even better platform for BSD based router / firewall.

the full article can be found here: …

So about a month ago we put in a new hosting infrastructure and me as the sole admin needed an easy way to monitor and keep an eye on all of my servers and the services and resources of each server.



So after some digging around I found that an application I use to use was now a new application Nagios. Now this application is great, took me about 2 days to set everything up as it is now, but once I found everything i needed it was great. Nagios uses SNMP Protocol to monitor almost anything on your server. It has a very OO configuration allowing you to reach some pretty complex setups. Mine didn't get too complex so i can't speak to all of that but it was pretty easy to setup once I got the hang of it. After I found these two Nagios Plugin pages I knew I was truely in heaven. …