CentOS – Community ENTerprise Operating System
CentOS 5.3 for the i386 and x86_64 architectures has been released today. I usually do not reproduce such announcements, but this CentOS release is somehow special to me.
Author Archives: George Notaras
My Music
Most people nowadays, including me, maintain MP3 collections. These collections may contain songs that have been ripped from CDs, LPs, cassettes (I’ve done it!) they or their friends own or that have been downloaded from the internet. During the last months, considering the constant growth of those MP3 collections and realizing that many of the…
Checking on Windows Vista
During the last couple of weeks I’ve been checking on Windows Vista Home Basic edition. I intend to buy a license for this edition of Windows to use on one of my computers and I decided to run it in trial mode for a while before actually purchasing it together with some other software I…
Burning a DVD still an adventure on GNU/Linux
Recently, I needed to burn several GBs of data, located on a SAMBA-based fileserver, to DVDs. The Nautilus’ CD/DVD burning extension simply could not burn the data over the network. I decided to try brasero, since it is said to be the most actively developed CD/DVD burning frontend for the GNOME desktop. Despite the fact…
How to upgrade WP-Super-Cache
A while ago, I had published a step-by-step guide about how to install WP-Super-Cache in WordPress successfully. Now, I’m going through the upgrade procedure, so to safely and effortlessly upgrade the plugin whenever a new version is released. I know that documenting this sh** should not be needed, but it turns out the installation of…
Xen DomU using dynamic IP and hostname
During the last months, I’ve been experimenting with Xen virtualization. An old computer, equipped with a Pentium III running at 700Mhz, 512MB of RAM and an 160GB IDE HDD runs four installations of my favorite Linux distribution, CentOS, one as a Dom0 and the other three as DomUs with 64MB of memory each.
Microsoft releases part of Web Sandbox code under the Apache License
On January 27 2009, that was 5 days ago, Microsoft said it has begun releasing much of the source code of a project named “Web Sandbox” under the terms of the Apache License version 2. From a note on the project at Live Labs: We provide an opportunity to test the Sandbox and find out…
Shred changes default number of passes to 3
I thought it would be nice to share with you that I received a comment from Pádraig Brady, member of the GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) maintainers team, on yesterday’s post about effective data wiping saying that he has decreased shred‘s default number of passes from 25 to 3, as shown in this git commit. The…
Effective data wiping with a single complete overwrite
One of the first things computer users, who are concerned with security, learn is that multiple overwrites with ones and zeros are required in order to wipe data to the extent that it is unrecoverable by any forensic analysis tools. According to this article on Softpedia, on which I stumbled while searching for something else,…
Always use a block device label or its UUID in fstab
If there are still references to device nodes for block devices, as they are set by the kernel, for example /dev/hda, in /etc/fstab, you should seriously consider replacing them with the volume’s label or its UUID. Even if you use an LVM setup, the /boot partition shouldn’t be referenced by its device node.