Tag Archives: linux

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

mkvmerge + mplayer Sadness Fix

May 22, 2011

I have been having some issues with newer versions of mkvmerge creating files that make mplayer cry. I finally messed around with the options enough to discover what (I think) was the problem. Header compression reduces filesizes of attachments significantly, but there are some compatibility problems with the files that have this option enabled. Here’s what I finally ended up with: mkvmerge -o video.mkv –default-language eng \ –compression -1:none –default-duration 0:41.708ms \ –nalu-size-length 0:4 -A video.264 –compression -1:none \ audio.dts [...]

LXPanel Plugins: Simplified

April 3, 2011

I started using LXDE last night, and I’m really liking it. It seems to take a whole ton less memory than Gnome did, and as a result my Intel Atom box runs a lot smoother because it doesn’t have to continuously swap. Anyway, I’ve been customizing some things, and I eventually found myself in plugin development land. LXPanel is the gnome-panel equivalent for LXDE. There doesn’t seem to be a Trash can plugin for it, and I think that’s just [...]

Moving the mouse with Python

June 26, 2010

I’ve been using KDE4 in Ubuntu, and I really like it – it’s slick, has everything I need, and it all seems to gel together pretty well. Yet, the power management is really starting to make me angry. I’ve turned all of it off, checked ps and other tools for any signs that it’s still running, and despite my efforts, my screens still turn black after 10 minutes unless mplayer is running. So, I decided to fix that using Python, [...]

Extracting M2TS length from a BDMV directory in Linux

January 14, 2010

I was having the hardest time getting various programs to echo the runtime of m2ts files in Linux, and it turns out someone wrote a parser for the files in the BDMV/PLAYLIST directory, which have all of this information. Get bdtools. I got Version 1.4. You can find it here. ./configure && make && sudo make install Try running mpls_dump. I got this error when running: mpls_dump: error while loading shared libraries: libbd-1.0.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such [...]

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