Al4 » IT

Buying a PC Power Supply in the UK, January 2012

Alex — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:30:36 +0000

In the process of building my first desktop PC in about 4 years, I’ve come to realise that I no longer know anything about PC hardware. At one stage I considered myself, perhaps incorrectly, to be fairly knowledgeable about the …

Adding a swap file on Linux

Alex — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:15:20 +0000

At work some of our Red Hat (RHEL5) servers with 32GB of ram were configured with only 2 Gb swap files. For some workloads this might be fine, but a 2-in-1 Apache and MySQL server is not one of them. …

How not to troubleshoot an unexplained server reboot

Alex — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:40:18 +0000

We asked our provider to investigate why one of our servers rebooted last night. In the process they accidentally rebooted it again… this is root’s bash_history just before it happened, note line 971: 954 2011-08-17_15:10:39 sar -q 955 2011-08-17_15:10:59 sar …

Upgrading my E4300

Alex — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:28:35 +0000

Two years is quite a long time for me to keep a computer, but this Dell has lasted surprisingly well. It lags a bit in the 3D graphics department, but CPU wise it’s still perfectly acceptable and 4gb of ram …

Keyboard layout switching to USA in Ubuntu 11.04

Alex — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 21:02:59 +0000

I recently upgraded the keyboard in my Dell E4300 from a standard USA model to a backlit UK model. All went great however I noticed that the keyboard layout kept switching back to the USA layout. It seemed to happen …

Getting the most out of Terminator

Alex — Tue, 24 May 2011 22:15:45 +0000

Terminator is a must-have tool for Linux administrators. It’s a terminal emulator that supports multiple terminals via tabs, but also by dividing up its window with horizontal and vertical splits. The user documentation is a bit sparse, in fact what …

Setting up a secure Ubuntu LAMP server

Alex — Mon, 23 May 2011 23:57:26 +0000

Disclaimer: This article is provided for your information only, and simply following this guide will not make your server “secure”. As the server administrator you are ultimately responsible for its security! Intro Having recently been through the process of setting …

A quick look at Unity in Ubuntu 11.04

Alex — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:29:11 +0000

I usually jump on the latest Ubuntu release before it hits the final release stage, but this time it was with a bit more trepidation than usual. You see they’ve replaced the shell with a completely new one – Unity. …

Recovering a RAID5 mdadm array with two failed devices

Alex — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 02:11:43 +0000

Got into an interesting situation with my parents home server today (Ubuntu 10.04). Hardware wise it’s not the best setup – two of the drives are in an external enclose connected with eSATA cables. I did encourage Dad to buy …

Quick analysis of a phishing attack

Alex — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 03:18:15 +0000

Twice in three days I have received emails purporting to be from ASB and ANZ Bank. Both are New Zealand banks, and the fact that I’ve received two of them clearly indicates that my email address is on a spam …