Al4 » Linux

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. …

Slow desktop performance on Ubuntu 11.10 with nvidia graphics cards

Alex — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:29:35 +0000

11.10 has been a bit of a mixed bag. On the plus side it has Gnome 3, giving me a practical (and in my opinion superior) alternative to Unity. On the minus side I had upgrade glitches on both my …

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 …

Disabling that annoying drum beat at the ubuntu login screen

Alex — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:01:42 +0000

As much for my reference as anyone else’s: sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --type=bool --set /desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds false Found at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1756504

Stopping the Intel WiFi LED from blinking in Ubuntu

Alex — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:21:32 +0000

My Dell E4300 has an Intel 5100 wifi card and the led blinks constantly. I still don’t understand how Intel can consider blinking the wifi LED during data transfer to be a sensible default. For most people it blinks non-stop …

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 …