Author Archives: ward

International Day Against DRM

Posted on May 4, 2012 by ward

May 4th is the International Day Against DRM. To celebrate, get 50% off all e-books at oreilly.com – today only! Use the code DRMFREE.

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Migrate MoinMoinWiki to Redmine

Posted on November 6, 2011 by ward

I had a few old MoinMoin installs that were due for an upgrade, and I wanted to migrate them to Redmine. I found a migration script at norwinter.com, which I improved a bit. It will handle wiki pages with full … Continue reading →

Posted in Sysadmin | Leave a comment

grub rescue commands

Posted on August 28, 2011 by ward

I wasted some time on Friday trying to get a machine with grub 2 installed to boot. The machine booted into Grub’s rescue mode. Grub 2′s rescue mode is nice, but not exactly intuitive (no ‘help’ or ‘?’ command), and … Continue reading →

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disk, disk, disk

Posted on July 12, 2011 by ward

I started adding 165 TB of disk to one of our clusters today. This is what that looks like – 55 three TB disks: The packaging was not too great; while all disks were well packaged individually, the big boxes … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware, Sysadmin | Leave a comment

idle power draw of modern Opteron CPUs

Posted on April 5, 2011 by ward

I’ve been curious for a while about how much power Opteron CPUs draw when idle, so I set aside a bit of time to do some measurements. I used a Supermicro 1U system with redundant power supply. The motherboard model … Continue reading →

Posted in Environment, Sysadmin | 3 Comments

acts_as_paranoid and acts_as_versioned on Rails 3

Posted on April 1, 2011 by ward

A few years ago, I described how to combine acts_as_paranoid and acts_as_versioned in order to make deleted records end up in your versioning tables. In order to do the same thing under Rails 3, I had to make a few … Continue reading →

Posted in Rails | Leave a comment

compression

Posted on November 15, 2010 by ward

Before: -rw-r–r– 1 root root 1.1G 2010-10-31 20:19 10125-127-2010-10.error After: -rw-r–r– 1 root root 11M 2010-10-31 20:19 10125-127-2010-10.error.bz2 Bzip2 reduced the file to 1% of its original size. Not bad!

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resistor captcha

Posted on November 10, 2010 by ward

Adafruit Industries uses an awesome captcha. For an example, look at the Kinect bounty page (scroll all the way to the bottom).

Posted in Hardware | Leave a comment

64K hours

Posted on October 17, 2010 by ward

Some disks last a long time. This is an old IBM IDE drive (IC35L040AVVA07-0). smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Self-test log structure revision … Continue reading →

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microsoft discovers remote attestation

Posted on October 8, 2010 by ward

Via slashdot: Microsoft’s corporate VP for trustworthy computing – Scott Charney – has published a position paper that boils down to remote attestation: let ISPs cut off internet access for computers that are not deemed free of malware. So… how … Continue reading →

Posted in Free Software/Open Source, Hardware | Leave a comment