Usually, the only time I make a change to the timezone setting of the operating system is during the installation time. But it may happen that a change to that setting is necessary. There are several ways to do this, but, as usual, there is only one Right Way™ to set the timezone info in…
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.
delayed-shutdown is an initscript that delays the shutdown (runlevel 0) or reboot (runlevel 6) procedure as long as a pre-defined lock file exists. The goal is to create a mechanism, which can be used by programs that perform critical operations that must not be interrupted, in order to delay system shutdown until these programs have…
Although I do not intend to run VMWare directly on a physical partition containing Windows any time soon, a recent discussion on a greek linux users group about the implications of such an experiment made me write a post about an article I stumbled upon today. The article author notes: VMWare is an incredibly useful…
Until now I have been creating partition images with Partimage, which has never failed. Another very popular tool nowadays is CloneZilla. This software, which happens to include partimage among various other utilities, has wider filesystem support and a better set of features – taking/restoring backups across the network is supported. The fact that this is…
Midnight Commander (MC) is a lean, but powerful, two-panel file manager that, admittedly, promotes productivity while working from a console. Among other features, it implements a user menu with pre-defined actions that can be performed on the selected files or directories. This menu can be further customized by the user on a directory-, user- or…
The Slack World, a Slackware related online magazine has published a very good write-up about how to create a chroot environment. Tom Newsom writes in his article: In this document I shall be showing you how you can run, for testing purposes perhaps, two versions of Slackware simultaneously. Both will be fully fledged installs and…
The Red Hat Magazine included an excellent tip about how to lock out a user, if it fails to supply a valid password for a pre-defined number of login attempts. This is implemented by making use of the The PAM module pam_tally. This practice serves as a barrier for those, either human or bots, who…
A long time has passed since Fedora 6 was released, many of the initial bugs have been fixed, so I decided to perform an upgrade of the installation on the server that powers this web site. Everything has gone well, despite the fact that a few strange things happened during the upgrade.
Linux com has published an intersting article about recovering data after wiping the hard drive. The author describes a successful attempt to recover his lost photographs and videos by using two GPL tools, TestDisk and PhotoRec. It’s good to know that there are free tools out there that can actually do this job right. I…