Its handy to keep some remote dns servers in your head for troubleshooting. Here are some pretty fast and easy to remember NS ips for you (they are on level3 network). 4.2.2.1 4.2.2.2 4.2.2.3 4.2.2.4 4.2.2.5 4.2.2.6
Note, there is a short story before the main course.
I recently had a customer leave. It’s never good to lose a customer. They left not because of any service issues but because its hard for them to understand that I am not a web designer. I provided hosting service for them, and I tried to make it clear that they should find a web desinger and someone to maintain their site because that is not something I specialize in or have any interest in doing. At any rate this of course leads to them finding a designer who wants to move their site to some other host. I have no problems with that whatever makes the maintainer happy since he is the one
Today Citrix announced that it will distribute its enterprise packaging of Xen for free. This brings fancy gui management and features available in VMwares ESX server to everyone. (Actually I’m not clear if just the ability is there or if they actually are letting the gui go as well.) This is not a scaled down, limited version of the hypervisor. From the end of March on, there will be only one edition of XenServer which and it will be free.
Have you ever gotten a pdf with one of those annoying passwords? A while back I bought an e-book and it came with a password. Its really annoying especially if I want to read it on a mobile device. Anyway if you are annoyed as much as I am fear no more. Install qpdf Decrypt your pdf
Over the last couple days I’ve briefly talked about revisioning configs and making your home directory portable. It seems to have stirred up a bit of discussion over at Matt Simmons Standalone Sysadmin, and Hugh Browns mentioned he uses mercurial for this task.. As I noted in the post about managing /etc with version control I do revision my home directory, or at least pieces of it.
Seems like we are on a bit of a roll with regard to the topic of versioning lately. Yesterday Legooolas commented about using version control for your home directory. I do and I’ll cover that in a different post but I use it for a different task. Now on to todays topic. Do you keep track of configuration changes? You should. Maybe your using an advanced configuration management system like puppet.
Every time I have a new shell account I end up customizing it. Making alterations to my vimrc, screenrc or whatever. It can be a huge pain when you have lots of slightly varying configs on different machines. I wrote this little script to grab my files and create a self extracting shell script so I can easily setup my environment on multiple machines.
Waddya know I’m not the only geek with an affinity for the console. This could be interesting. Repository of useful one liners.
Yesterday I wrote about CPU Performance Analysis in Linux. I explained how to tell if you are experiencing a CPU bottleneck. This is just a quick followup to show the effect of adding more cpu power.
A while back I wrote a post Analyzing Linux System Performance and Finding Bottlenecks. I did’t really give a good explanation of determining if you are CPU bound or not so I am writing this post to clear that up.