Author Archives: Erik

KeePassX: The Perfect Password App

October 16, 2011

Recently, I’ve been having some trouble with passwords. Either the login name is a string I never use, and therefore never commit to memory (like my real phone number that I mask with Google Voice), or the password policy forces me to use a password that I’ll never remember (like sites that keep track of your past passwords, or require 11 characters of alternating symbols, letters and numbers, etc.). Since I use spamgourmet, any site that requires an email address [...]

English Instructions for Tomato SIM Cards found in Croatia

September 10, 2011

tomato signs With Tomato cheap talk and send SMS messages to all networks in Croatia at the lowest prices simply, without complications and without signing of the contract. What you see, it will be. practically New Tomato and the number of vouchers can be purchased at retail outlets across the country – in kiosks, shops, supermarkets, post offices, petrol stations. Tomato SIM Card and Activation Tomato SIM card is PIN and PUK. During activation, as well as each time you switch [...]

Hurricane Irene: MREs and RACES lessons learned

August 28, 2011

Last night, I participated in a RACES amateur radio net, manning 2 different fire stations over the course of 12 hours (2000 – 0830). This was my first time doing something like this, so I brought what I thought I would need: 2m/440 radio (IC-92AD) 12v AGM battery (just in case) Cellphone with unlimited 3g and tethering Laptop Power strip All of these but the battery proved useful (and the battery is currently useful at home). But, I found my setup [...]

Fill an LVM volume group completely with a single logical volume

August 25, 2011

I learned a cool LVM trick today – how to resize a logical volume to use a certain percentage of a volume group. Since I just have one logical volume in the group, I did the following: [root@nyu ~]# lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/diclonius/vector Extending logical volume vector to 7.28 TiB Logical volume vector successfully resized Thanks Redhat Documentation! In other news, I ran a performance test on my 5-drive RAID-5 using HD204UI drives from Samsung: [root@nyu tmp]# dd if=/dev/zero of=foo [...]

Why RAID-Z isn’t appropriate for me (or for almost any home user)

August 21, 2011

So, ZFS is cool. OpenSolaris derivatives are cool. RAID-Z is cool. But it lacks one simple feature that other software RAID solutions handle – the ability to grow a volume by increasing the stripe size. For instance, let’s just postulate that you have 3 2TB hard disks in a RAID-5, and you want to add 2 more to make a 5-disk volume. Well, with ZFS, you have 2 options: Back up everything on the current volume, destroy it, and create a [...]

Maximizing rsync performance between Linux and Solaris

August 20, 2011

I now am a proud owner of an OpenIndiana server, and I’ve been moving files to it over gigabit ethernet for the past few hours. During this time, I’ve made some important realizations, and I figured I’d note them here for everyone’s benefit. My transfers started off at about 10MB/s sustained, which is right around 100Mbit/s speeds, but on a gigabit network. 1. Ethernet Cables Something we don’t think about too often these days is the type/quality of Ethernet cable we’re using [...]

Telling bash to step aside for zsh

August 18, 2011

So, let’s say that you want to change your shell to zsh, but fall back to bash if it isn’t available on whatever system you’re using. This is useful if you use something like NIS or LDAP with home directory NFS, since you’ll be sshing around and bringing your .bashrc with you everywhere. The solution is pretty simple – just add this to the bottom of your .bashrc: hash zsh 2>&- && exec zsh Update: This breaks X-windows. Need to [...]

A zsh adventure

August 16, 2011

Oh yeah, zsh guys. It’s awesome, and you should know that, but what makes one switch from good ol’ bash? Generally, it’s prompt magic, but really there’s some other nice features that make it worth considering. But first, prompt magic. I had some trouble getting the prompt to respect the width of my terminal, but it was resolved by escaping some things I had in there. I ended up with this: To do that, you just need the following in [...]

OpenIndiana Jones

August 9, 2011

So, after a bunch of research about building a DIY NAS, I decided to buy a whole bunch of hardware to do so. But, the real question was which software to use. FreeNAS seems to be the most popular solution, and I heard it was better than something called OpenFiler. Then I stumbled across NexentaStor, which is free for any NAS less than 18TB in size, which is fine for me. I was basically ready to go with that, but [...]

Solaris and echo

July 22, 2011

OK, most UNIX programmers are familiar with the echo command. It just takes input and writes it back out again – pretty simple, right? WRONG. Solaris has at least one shell, it seems, that has a version of echo with epic bugs. For instance, here’s what it does when you give it the -n flag, which tells it not to print a newline after echoing the input: $ echo -n “I love Solaris” -n I love Solaris $ Yes, instead [...]

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