Sigurd Høgsbro

I recently found XMing, a free X server for Windows, providing a useful alternative to VNC for accessing remote Ubuntu desktops. Instructions here.

On occasion I access (Ubuntu) Linux servers from Windows using Putty and WinSCP. In order to preserve UTF-8 filenames, some snakeoil is required. (more…)

scponly provides a mechanism to enable secure file-access to a server, with marked improvement over FTP.

scponly can be setup in a) normal mode, whereby the user can see the whole of the file-system of the server, or b) in chroot’ed mode, whereby the user only sees the files the server administrator has granted access to. The latter is what I wanted, but there are a few extra steps required for 64-bit kernel servers. (more…)

I spotted on Ubuntu’s news-section that Dell finally have commenced shipping products (1 desktop, 1 notebook) with Ubuntu. Available in UK, Germany and France. Excellent!

In applying the latest Feisty Fawn updates to one of my laptops I ran into a problem with the bootup hanging shortly after starting. The usual snakeoil of ‘acpi=off pci=noacpi’ appended to the boot command line failed to make any difference.

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I recently setup a cluster of Linux compute servers, and found myself looking for instrumentation to monitor & control the servers. The following open-source packages give excellent insight and access to the state of the cluster:

• Ganglia - server stats, historical data (check Wikipedia’s cluster)
• Monit - process monitoring/control
• MonALISA - dynamic distributed service architecture

I was an early adopter of Subversion and Edgewall’s Trac. Installation of Trac on my defacto Linux distro, CentOS, has not been very straightforward due to it being a RHEL clone. This guide has documented the process in a clear and easy-to-follow guide. Well done!

Update: I’m looking at distributed SCMs, Mercurial looks interesting:

• Mercurial: an alternative to git
• Whose Distributed VCS Is The Most Distributed?
• Comments on Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS) Software Configuration Management (SCM) Systems

Subversion 2.0 will likely borrow distributed design elements from Mercurial.

To manage your sets of photos, try these (free) tools:

• Picasa (part of the Google tool-chest) for Windows users
• F-Spot for Linux

For online photo gallery, I like the tagging aspect of this PHP script.

Linux-mag has a very useful set of ‘guru’ articles for newly-hatched sysadm’s.

I have been looking for a replacement to the encrypting filesystem which was part of PGP v6 (international edition) for a while. I believe I have now found it - EncFS, which is described further in this presentation. (more…)