I’ve got too many computers

Oh boy, I should have seen this coming. I'll be moving shortly. Same city, just hopping from a flat to another. I am packing things around and one by one I had to touch all the computers I have accumulated during the last five years that I've spent in this house. They're just too many…

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Syncing all ZFS snapshots

Apparently that's something that everybody is rolling on their own. It's 2019 and Netapp still rightfully has market share because it's the only vendor that has snapmirror technology. Common scenario: you have to sites, and you want to have both data volume snapshots and replication between two sites. Apparently ZFS can readily do both as…

Dell Optiplex FX160: don’t even bother

  So I was intrigued on the reporting by someone's website about the Dell Optiplex Fx160 (see pic related, keyboard and mouse for scale) On paper, it's a very nice machine: dual-core x86 Intel Atom processor @ 1.6 GHz 2/4 GB ram 2 GB basic flash hard drive additional SATA port wide variety of ports…

Passing Red Hat’s RHCSA certification (EX200): my experience

Just a week ago I passed the Red Hat Certified System Administrator exam, and here are some brief notes about my experience. Why the RHCSA certification? At first I didn't plan on taking the exam at all. But I have been using pretty much Debian/Xubuntu only for a long long time and for the last…

On commenting code: external vs internal documentation

In my day job, I sometimes have to write scripts in order to automate things that either happen too often to be handled manually or need to be handled in the shortest amount of time possible.But more often, I am tasked with modifying the behavior of an already existing script and/or adding new functionalities.Needless to…

Decommisioning acso-explorer.santoro.tk

Today I stopped serving requests for the domain http://acso-explorer.santoro.tk. Acso-explorer was a patched version of gcc-explorer, bundled with pre-built cross-toolchains of gcc-m68k, gcc-mips and gcc-amd64. The last request has been served October 29, 2016, but the node.js process was consuming 5-6% CPU with unjustified spikes to 10-12%. I'll be setting up a pointed to the…

XDM, fingerprint readers and ecryptfs

how to setup pam/xdm to work correctly with fingerprint login and ecryptfs-encrypted filesystem

Learn how to use GNU info

Recently I've been digging a lot into GNU/Linux system administration and as part of this, I have finally taken some time to google about that mysterious info command that has been sitting here in my GNU/Linux systems, unused for years. Well, I can tell you, it has been a life-changing experience. Texinfo-based documentation is awesome.…

Some notes on bash shell programming

I recently began working as a GNU/Linux System Engineer at a software company. My job involves answering to tickets from customers, and take action in the case of blocking issues. In doing all this, I am reading a lot of bash scripts, and I am also deepening my knowledge of the Bash shell as a…

Building GNU Emacs from sources

I want to look at the GNU Emacs source code because I have some ideas I want to try and implement. If you want to write patches for an open-source project, the first thing to do is to check out the latest version from the repository, make sure it compiles and runs. At this stage,…