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Log iptables Messages to a Separate File with rsyslog
April 17th, 2009
Learn how to filter iptables log messages to a separate file. Two methods are presented: one using traditional syslog and one using rsyslog.
Using YSlow to Optimize Web Site Performance Continued
March 27th, 2009
The second part of an article/tutorial on using the YSlow firebug extension to optimize web site performance.
Using YSlow to Optimize Web Site Performance
March 26th, 2009
An article/tutorial on using the YSlow firebug extension to optimize web site performance.
Firefox 3 Native Form Widgets Look Terrible
January 6th, 2009
Firefox 3 added native form widgets on Linux. Most of the time they look great, but on some sites including mine, they look awful. Here’s how I styled my forms to avoid native widgets.
Safely Removing External Drives in Linux
January 4th, 2009
Simply unmounting a filesystem is not the ideal way to remove an external USB/firewire/SATA drive in Linux. This tutorial explains why and gives a solution.
Monitoring Hard Drive Health on Linux with smartmontools
January 2nd, 2009
S.M.A.R.T. is a system in modern hard drives designed to report conditions that may indicate impending failure. smartmontools is a free software package that can monitor S.M.A.R.T. attributes and run hard drive self-tests. Although smartmontools runs on a number of platforms, I will only cover installing and configuring it on Linux.
Updated awstats for Debian
December 30th, 2008
The awstats package in Debian is pretty outdated. Etch has version 6.5. Sid has 6.7. Version 6.9 was released on December 28, 2008. I’m a statistics junky and the new version has better robot detection so I built an updated package on my lenny/sid machine: awstats_69-1_all.deb. This package also works perfectly on my etch server without changes.
I did apply all the Debian patches that were still relevant so it should be the equivalent of the official Debian package.
How to Shrink an LVM Volume Safely
August 30th, 2008
Logical Volume Management is a vast improvement over standard partitioning schemes. Among many other things, it allows you to decrease the size of a volume without recreating it completely. Here’s how.
Fixing uTorrent File Associations in Linux
August 23rd, 2008
Running uTorrent under wine works pretty well in Linux. For a quick overview of installation, see this HowTo Ubuntu blog post. One problem with installing under wine is that file associations are not set correctly. This means that double-clicking a .torrent file or opening a .torrent link in your browser won’t automatically start uTorrent. Here’s how to solve that.
