I use a lot of out-of-band management like ASM, DRAC, etc, along with java vnc plugins for various products. I haven’t been having a lot of luck running them on my Ubuntu laptop. Over the weekend it finally dawned on me what might be going on. I am not running the Oracle Java, but the OpenJDK one with the icedtea plugin that is installed as part of Ubuntu. I found a repo that has an installer script: Read more

This one bit me in the proverbial recently. Was trying to setup phpmyadmin for a client on a different host to the database. This was installing apparently successfully, but failed after that. I hacked the installer code to and finally figured out that it was grant rights to the user@hostname (not user at IP address). So I changed the installer to lookup the IP and insert this. This got everything installed, but I was still have some other weird issues. Read more

I pretty much run Debian stable at home for all my servers. KVM, NFS, FW/GW, Myth, etc. A few months ago (probably almost a year) I set up dual stack IPv6 and IPv4 at home and tunnelled over IPv4 to Hurricane Electric. Most things were working fine, I even had one host that was only IPv6 to try certain things out. Recently I finished upgrading everything from Squeeze to Wheezy. This went well (as it usually does), except for a few odd things that were happening around the network… Read more

I need to backup my laptop. Previously when using a Mac, I had a hard drive sitting in my office and would plug it in every morning and Time Machine would do it’s thing. A recent tweet by @rackerhacker said he was using crashplan, so I thought I would give it a go. Crashplan is pretty good if you pay for it. I am not so concerned about the ‘cloud’ storage, but would like incremental backups taken more often, so I could find files at previous dates and/or times, but that is not the major reason for me to have backups. It is in case my laptop gets stolen, or the SSD decides to go bad. Read more

I have been waiting in anticipation to buy a copy of Gene Kim’s “The Phoenix Project”, and when it was released last week, I wasted no time snapping up a copy. By no means am I a big reader, or a fast reader, I do have a high comprehension rate, and I generally stick to reading white papers, blog posts, Etc., as opposed to technical books, I have a few on my virtual shelf, and I have read them in one form or another (e.g. cover to cover, or as a reference). Read more