Random Bits

Random Bits

  • Home
  • Contact

Latest Project: a Sudoku Site

August 23rd, 2010

In my spare time, I’ve been playing around with jQuery and databases. I decided to make a simple site to guide my learning. It’s basically functional at this point so, presenting:

FillTheGrid.com – Sudoku for the Web (Yes, all the good domains are taken)

Future plans including fleshing it out into a more complete site (contact, about, help, maybe a blog), adding user support especially for remembering which puzzles you’ve played, and adding lots of fun statistics surrounding games won, time taken, difficulty, etc.

Posted in Personal | No Comments »

Integrate fail2ban with WordPress: Spam Log Plugin

April 20th, 2009

Spam Log is a WordPress plugin that writes a log entry for every comment marked as spam. The log file is suitable for processing by fail2ban.

Continue »

Tags: admin, development, fail2ban, iptables, wordpress
Posted in Linux, Web | 10 Comments »

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.

Continue »

Tags: admin, firehol, firewall, howto, iptables, logrotate, rsyslog
Posted in Linux | 29 Comments »

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.

Continue »

Tags: admin, apache, css, development, html, performance, yslow
Posted in Web | 2 Comments »

Using YSlow to Optimize Web Site Performance

March 26th, 2009

An article/tutorial on using the YSlow firebug extension to optimize web site performance.

Continue »

Tags: admin, apache, css, development, html, performance, yslow
Posted in Web | 4 Comments »

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.

Continue »

Tags: css, development, firefox, forms
Posted in Linux, Web | 1 Comment »

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.

Continue »

Tags: admin, backup, howto
Posted in Linux | 11 Comments »

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.

Continue »

Tags: admin, howto, smart
Posted in Linux | 75 Comments »

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.

Tags: awstats, debian
Posted in Linux | 3 Comments »

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.

Continue »

Tags: admin, howto, lvm
Posted in Linux | 51 Comments »

« Previous
  • Topics

    • Personal (2)
    • Technology (13)
      • Linux (11)
      • Web (4)
  • Meta

    • Log in
    • Valid XHTML

Feed | Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2008-2013 Random Bits
Powered by Wordpress