For the last year or so I’ve been using SendGrid to relay all emails coming from my server. I don’t send a lot of emails through the system; it’s mostly notifications from the blog and a few related automated messages. While I like paid version of SendGrid (which I’ve used at work), the free version [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Linux category.
Taking Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin for a spin
It’s been about 2 weeks since Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) has been released and I figured it was about time to take it for a spin. I reformatted my Dell Latitude E4200 (which was running Linux Mint 12 KDE) and installed the 64 bit desktop edition. I thought I was done with this entire Unity/Gnome [...]
Mounting Box.net on Mint 12 / Ubuntu 11.10
Right now, through March 23, Box.net is running a promotion to give you a free 50 GB for life (instead of their normal 5 GB) if you signup through their Android application. If you don’t know, Box.net offers cloud file storage and sync, much like Dropbox. Personally, I prefer to use Spideroak, but I figured [...]
Non-interactive (Unattended) password change under Ubuntu
Last night I had programmatically created a large number of users on a server. Today, I started getting emails from the users complaining that their new accounts didn’t work. Turns out my user creation script had not set their passwords correctly, so I needed to reset everyone’s password. Try as I might, I could not [...]
How to: Disassembling (and reassembling) the Globalscale DreamPlug
At work we received a couple of Globalscale DreamPlug (Model: 003-DS2001) units for a research project of mine. These are nifty little plug based computers with an impressive array of features for their form factor, including: 1.2 GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, onboard 4GB MicroSD, Dual Gigabit NIC, 802.11b/g/n WiFi and bluetooth. Of course, as soon [...]
Automated Screen Launch
At my previous company I set myself up a screen server as mentioned in my previous post, “A screen/shell server is awesome!“. There were only a half dozen servers there so if the screen server got rebooted, it wasn’t a big deal to get my sessions back up and running. At my new company we [...]
Amazon ElastiCache – Underwhelmed?
This morning I received an email from Amazon Web Services announcing the release of Amazon ElastiCache. In Amazon’s own words “ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud.” At first glance, that sounds very handy to have. After all, Amazon already has DB [...]
A screen/shell server is awesome!
GNU screen is not a new tool and while I’ve known about it for a long time, I’ve never had a use for it. What is the point of having multiplexed terminals when I can simply launch more (under Ubuntu)? When I’m in Windows, I can just launch more SSH connections. While having more screens [...]
Weekend Server Overhaul
In early 2010 I signed up and migrated to Linode.com for my server needs. At that point in time, the latest version of Ubuntu that was offered was 9.10; the only useful colo location was Dallas; and IPv6 was unheard of (well, not exactly unheard of, but having a server with IPv6 was). We’ve had [...]
