Thoughts from the abyss

Themes

max — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:46:46 +0000

Playing around with some themes again. It’s time for change, but I haven’t decided which one I like or want yet, so I apologize for different looks and views for a little while as I make up my mind.

VMware Infrastructure Client 2.5 Recent Connections

max — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:23:01 +0000

One annoying feature of VMware Infrastructure Client 2.5, used for connecting to ESX and ESXi hosts, is the fact that it likes to remember any IP addresses and names of connections in the login screen. While I appreciate its helpfulness, when you have a dozen machines used for testing no longer being accessed, I got tired of looking at them in the drop-down menu. To delete any of the old connections, open up regedit.

Start -> Run -> regedit

CTRL+F or Edit -> Find

Type in “RecentConnections” and your VMware recent connections list should pop up somewhere under HKU registry. Just open this up and delete any hosts you don’t want to see anymore.

www.childsplaycharity.org

max — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:37:29 +0000

I ran across www.childsplaycharity.org today, which I urge you to visit. You can either donate money to them, or better yet, you can pick items off of listed Childs Play Hospital’s Amazon’s Gift Lists, and send items directly to a childrens hospital of your choosing. Very cool. A copy of Hotel for Dogs is on it’s way to the childrens hospital most nearest me right now.

Resize Encrypted LVM Volume Group

max — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:36:28 +0000

# lvextend -L+5G /dev/vg0/whatever
  Extending logical volume whatever to 45.00 GB
  Logical volume whatever successfully resized

# cryptsetup resize /dev/mapper/whatever

# resize2fs /dev/mapper/whatever
resize2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Filesystem at /dev/mapper/whatever is mounted on /whatever; on-line resizing required
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/mapper/whatever to 11796351 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/mapper/whatever is now 11796351 blocks long.

Voila! Your encrypted partition has been resized.

CentOS wiki issues

max — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:21:55 +0000

Very long time, no post. I had a fire at my house, well not mine the neighbor’s fire damaged mine but anyways, at the beginning of the year, so a lot of things in life got put on hold as I dealt with that. That being said, some recent discussions about the CentOS wiki came up again on the documentation mailing list. There’s a big attitude about posting material on their wiki these days from a few, so I decided to not participate there any longer. I removed my name from all the pages I had created and worked on there, but left the content.

If you’re visiting there and find stale information, that’s the reason why. I’ll only be maintaining documentation here at this site now. It’s sad, and I hope attitudes start to change in the future of CentOS. It seems they are driving more and more people away. Wikis are about sharing, but there is so much control and criticism at the CentOS wiki it’s hard to share these days without being discouraged.

Added BackupPC guide

max — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:48:39 +0000

I recently switched from using rsnapshot to trying out BackupPC as a backup utility. I like it well enough to start using it at my employer as well, so I figured I’d write a guide up on how to install it and use it on CentOS, since the RPMs are available from their testing repository.

The guide concentrates on using rsync as the primary backup medium, and also includes a section on using AutoMySQLBackup to dump MySQL backups. As always, I welcome all comments and criticism. Enjoy.

Adding DNS suffix search lists to dhclient.conf

max — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:47:30 +0000

For whatever reason, I had a hard time finding how to add DNS search suffix lists to a dhcp client in Linux. So I’m adding it here, so I can easily find how to do so.

# vim /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf
supersede domain-name "domain1.com domain2.com domain3.com";

Save the file and restart the network.

# service network restart

Then cat the contents of /etc/resolv.conf and you should see the changes.

# cat /etc/resolv.conf
search domain1.com domain2.com domain3.com
nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Hmmm, Amarok or Songbird

max — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:10:30 +0000

For a long time, I’ve been using Amarok for my music player at both work and home. Since I switched my desktop at home back to CentOS from Fedora, though, I haven’t found an easy way to get Amarok installed back on it. I’ve been playing around with Songbirg tonight though, and I’m pretty impressed. I think I might have found my new music player. Installation is a breeze, because there’s nothing to compile. Just unzip, use, and enjoy.

Songbird is built on Mozilla technology and code, but it’s not one of Mozilla’s products. The reason I like it so far from what I see is because it has a similar menu and preference structure as Thunderbird and Firefox has. They have add-ons which can be easily installed, and it seems pretty fast. Since I already use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird, it’s easy to navigate around the menus if you already use Mozilla like products.

Check it out if you’re looking for a new music player. I just might have to switch from Amarok…no offense to Amarok. Amarok is an awesome and powerful music player, but, it’s a pita to get it installed on CentOS.

Free online file coversion

max — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:36:33 +0000

I had to use Zamzar today to convert a .pptx to a ppt and odp file. It worked well. I’m not sure I trust sending documents that contain personal or sensitive information out, but for something like a simple product presentation, I think it worked fine.

Upload the file, and then you can choose the type of conversion you want done, and then they e-mail you where to download the file after the conversion is done.

http://www.zamzar.com/

Added new how to for encrypting /tmp /swap and /home

max — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:56:43 +0000

Title says it all. I now having /tmp /swap and /home encrypted on my laptop, as well as /tmp /swap /home and /srv (used for backing up laptop) on my desktop at home. Remember, no use encrypting your laptop if you’re backing it up in the same location without encryption.

Guide can be found here on this site: Encrypt /tmp /swap & /home.

Also, you can find it on the CentOS Wiki.