I upgraded my linode server from ubuntu distro lucid to precise today. I didn't have any specific needs, but lucid is getting EOLed in a couple months.

It broke my DNS server. This is what ended up fixing it: ( Read more... )

I've had a lot of problems listening to stuff with apparently screwed up (horribly imbalanced) stereo lately. A useful solution I just found is the mplayer argument "-channels 1". It causes mplayer to ask the audio decoder to give it 1 audio channel. I still wish pulseaudio had a simple built in mix-to-mono function.

Ksplice. Available in the Ubuntu Universe repository since Karmic (October 2009).

I've been fantasizing about this for years.

One of the things that has always been nice about Linux has been how much less often it needs to be rebooted for things like software installation and upgrades. But it has still needed to be rebooted for occasional security fixes for the operating system itself - the kernel.

Now it doesn't.

"An evaluation against Linux kernel security patches from May 2005 to May 2008 found that Ksplice was able to apply all of the 64 significant kernel vulnerabilities discovered in that interval."

( Read more... )

Update 2010-12-21: It says it updated my kernel on both my home computer and (linode) virtual server.

This is my third unexpected outage in the 2.7 years I've had it. This time there were no clues as to the reason. The only solution appears to be rebuilding the kernel with KDB, the kernel debugger. If this happens again, I'll be asking linode to provide that.

The first time was a crash, which I was told was related to uml, so I switched to xen. The second time was a raid problem with the host. "We believe this was caused by a flaky drive, which has since been replaced."

I'm very happy with this record.

"Every base is base 10."

$ bc -ql
obase=4
4
10

bc is a calculator program. Default input and output bases are 10. If you set the output base to 4, and type 4 (input base 10), you get 10 (base 4).

In its own base, all bases are base 10.

Thanks to feng_huang for the link.

I hate puns. I am feeling very uncharacteristically conflicted.

I hate it when people mention "orders of magnitude" without specifying what magnitude (base), often assuming base 10.

In base 10, 1,000 is two orders of magnitude greater than 10. But in base, say, 2 (which is often relevant to my interests), 1,000 is 6.6 orders of magnitude greater than 10.

You (or perhaps I) would hope that authors of a book on High Dynamic Range Imaging, which involves math, particularly the base 2 kind, both due to the generally binary nature of computers, and that it is the base used for photographic Exposure Value / F-stops with which dynamic range is measured, would have greater sensitivity to this issue.

I'm currently the eighth most prolific wikipedia editor, working on the HDRI article.

(All numbers are in base 10.)
(Please check my math.)

16:48 < Ice> a former roommate of mine had written a script that changes his password 16 times then back to his old password
16:48 < Ice> because they save 15 times.
16:51 < Ice> Darxus, half the IT department uses it XD

- #linode

http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/linodebw/linode.daily.png.html

That spike starts when I disabled greylisting, and ends five days after I turned it back on.

(Yes, the unit of bandwidth really is gigabytes per month (overall, for the whole server, including web serving). It's the unit in which my quota is specified.)


Also, ntop monitors bandwidth by port and is in the ubuntu archives and is cool. (Next time it shouldn't be as hard to figure out a sudden change in bandwidth usage.)