Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Philip continues to play devil’s advocate / script kiddie for my telnet URL handler. My input checker allowed host/port definitions to begin with a hyphen character. That’s an invalid domain name, so I ignored the possibility that someone might try it. Philip used it to pass a ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Firefox’s telnet protocol handler in Linux stopped working some time after version 3.0. I manage a network of switches, routers, and other devices with command-line interfaces. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to click on telnet:// or ssh:// URLs again?

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

I have two Skype accounts; one for work, and one for personal use. Unfortunately, the Skype client for Linux is somewhat limited. It can store two usernames, but it saves only the last password entered. Tonight, I hacked up a solution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Last week I upgraded from Kubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” to 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”. The word “upgrade” here is misleading, since I chose to reformat to take advantage of filesystem changes. However, I imported much of my customisations from backup. Here are my notes on Lucid, from the ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

I recently discussed how to use LVM to make a live copy of a BackupPC pool. That guide covers how to set up LVM on a new server with no data. But what if you already have a working BackupPC install, and you want to move your existing pool to LVM?

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

I try to post a few times each month, but somehow January (and most of February) fell through the cracks. Lately I’ve been busy with operational tasks, which hasn’t left me much room for engineering. I haven’t solved any particularly hard or unusual problems, which is usually what ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

We run several virtual machine host servers on a network with multiple VLANs. The virtual machines are members of different VLANs, but are not themselves aware of the VLAN. This is how we did it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

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 ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Friday I upgraded from Kubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” to Kubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Here are my notes on the upgrade.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

We recently moved our primary backup machine to another location, and have overhauled a lot of our network infrastructure. This meant a lot of work updating the Bacula configurations on those machines. I’ve been unhappy with Bacula for some time, so I replaced it with BackupPC.

( Read more... )