Since upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 I’ve noticed poor performance of VirtualBox guests with Intel VT-X hardware virtualisation enabled. This has been noted in a few places, but I didn’t enable VT-x until recently so I can’t be sure that the problem began with Karmic. I can be sure that it is happening to me now.
Tags: amd64, karmic, ubuntu, virtualbox
I previously wrote about running apps as root on a normal user’s desktop. I still recommend that you follow those steps, but one thing has changed with the release of karmic and the inclusion of the qtcurve widget style.
Friday I upgraded from Kubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” to Kubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Here are my notes on the upgrade.
We are currently moving our customer hosting platform from our old colo to our new one. The servers run cPanel on CentOS 4. The process of moving these services goes something like this:
- install new servers at new location of same or similar model as the old servers, and load them with a basic CentOS install
- rsync oldserver:/ to newserver:/ including customer files
- reboot new server and fix whatever goes wrong (MAC addresses changing, etc)
- move BGP announcement of hosting IP range to new colo
- shut down and remove old servers
The actual process is more complicated. During step 2, I hit a problem with cPanel’s /home/virtfs directory tree.
I recently switched my primary mouse from a Logitech V450 to a much simpler Logitech RX650. The RX650 is a basic OEM mouse. It is larger than the V450 and doesn’t have the useful space below the mouse to store the compact USB receiver. It only has a range of 1.5m from the receiver, compared to 10m for the V450. So why did I switch? Because the RX650 uses 27 MHz for communication, whereas nearly every other cordless mouse on the market today, including my old V450, uses 2.4 GHz.
Firefox has a very annoying “feature” – it remembers any HTTP authentication tokens for as long as Firefox remains open. Any by “open”, I mean “the browser is running”, not “the tab/window is open”.
Why is this bad? For several reasons. Read the rest of this entry »
Although I administer most servers via SSH, I also use Webmin. Webmin is convenient for almost any simple administrative task, and is often better for some jobs. For instance, it is the easiest way I have found to browse Postfix email queues. Perhaps most importantly, it can save you from having to learn yet another daemon’s unique configuration language and syntax.
It can also be very handy if you have to fix something from your smartphone, where the command line isn’t always the best choice of tool. Enter: the Virtualmin Mobile/iPhone Theme.
Tags: webmin
You really shouldn’t allow SSH logins via password. This is doubly true for root. On most of my hosts we allow SSH for normal users with a password, but restrict root to SSH keys only. And we always protect against brute force attacks with fail2ban.
If you aren’t already using SSH keys and SSH agent, you should. SSH agent forwarding allows for secure sideways authentication. For example:
Cleaning up after the KDE 4 upgrade continues. Today I tried to port kregexpeditor from hardy, but pbuilder stopped with a library conflict:
kdelibs5-dev: Conflicts: kdelibs4-dev but 4:3.5.10.dfsg.1-1ubuntu8 is to be installed
I’m sure I could have resolved this, but I decided to test the hardy package before spending any more effort. The package installed without complaint, and the binary runs. I’ve added the amd64 and i386 packages from hardy-backports to the repo for jaunty.
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