If you've been experimenting with different operating systems for a while, or you have some need to run more than one OS on a particular desktop machine, chances are you've been playing around with Oracle Virtualbox due to its ease of use, popular set of features, flexibility, and cost. You've also probably run into the following syndrome (usually while trying to build a new virtual machine):
You configure a new virtual machine.
You associate a bootable optical disk image with the new VM (for the sake of argument, let's say you're experimenting with the 50 megabyte(!) distro Damn Small Linux …
If there is a chance - any chance - that you have a random web application that you might hit more often than ten times an hour, do yourself a favor and stick it behind a caching proxy of some kind, like Nginx.
There is a phenomenon I've come to call Ubuntu Syndrome, after the distribution of Linux which has become the darling of nearly every hosting provider out there (and no, I won't call them bloody cloud providers). All things considered, it seems to have a good balance of stable software, ease of use, availability, and diversity of available software. It also lends itself readily to the following workflow:
Use a tool like packer.io to automagically instantiate a copy of Ubuntu at the hosting provider of choice.
EDIT: 2014/12/23: Added reference to, a link to, and a local copy of the United Nations' Committee Against Torture report.
I would have written about this earlier in the week when it was trendy, but not having a working laptop (and my day job keeping me too busy lately to write) prevented it. So, here it is:
If you're in the mad scramble to patch the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL on your Ubuntu servers but you need to see some documentation, look in your /usr/share/doc/openssl/changelog.Debian.gz file. If you see the following at the very top of the file, you're patched:
VirtualBox is a (mostly) open source virtualization stack designed to run on desktop machines. While you can run it in a "serious" fashion (such as using VMs to implement your network infrastructure) it really shines if you use it as part of your development effort.
If you want to get under the hood the VBoxManage utility is the first place to start. It lets you do things like convert and manipulate disk images, something that I do from time to time at work these days. Until I ran into the following problem when trying to convert a VMDK virtual disk …
Kali Linux (formerly Backtrack) is a distribution of Linux designed for penetration testers and information security professionals. I'll spare you the details - that's what Wikipedia is for - but I did want to post about a problem that I've been wrestling with for a couple of hours.
Kali Linux can be installed and operated like any other distribution of Linux, which means that you get all of the nifty and handy tools that you'd expect to have, like AIDE for monitoring the file system for unauthorized changes. Unfortunately, because Kali is based upon Debian, and Debian over-engineers a lot of things …
Publically posted for future reference by sysadmins everywhere.
Regarding the Falcon RAID shelf, model ESA16G1B-0030 (3U high, sixteen SATA drive bays, hardware RAID, SCSI interface, two crappy serial ports (headphone jacks? really? you folks took this whole binary thing way too literally!), Ethernet jack, flip-out ears on the front with a rudimentary control panel on the left-hand side) from RAID, Inc. I just inherited one of these at work with no documentation, warranty, or support for it whatsoever. Consequently, I've spent most of a week trying to figure out how to set the damned thing up. Also, I haven't been …
