Going from macOS to Ubuntu
It's not the first time I'm switching to Ubuntu. I've been, as they say, around the block when it comes to operating systems. I started out on MS, from DOS to XP, then Ubuntu from...
ubuntu
A collection of 21 posts
Fixing Heartbleed
Four days ago the news about the Heartbleed got every sysadmin's attention. Renowned security expert Bruce Schneier writes: > This means that anything in memory -- SSL private...
Vagrant Tip: Sync VirtualBox Guest Additions
Quick tip. If you lose your Vagrant mounts after kernel upgrades in your virtualbox, you'll need to reinstall your VirtualBox Guest Additions. Same is true when you upgrade Vagrant...
Installing Hubot on Ubuntu
We used to run Hubot on Heroko until it crashed, not sure what happened exactly but we didn't bother bring it back due more pressing issues within our company. Then I saw one of...
Highlevel Testing With CasperJS
If you've written a webapp and you want to ensure that critical parts such as the signup process stay working, the best would be to have an actual user go through that process ever...
5,000,000 Visitors = Free Beer for Switzerland!
When I started this techblog in 2007 and got my first 500 real visitors, I was in the clouds. If you told me then I'd hit the 5,000,000 visitor milestone 3 years later, I would hav...
Running Ruby on Rails on Nginx
If you want to set up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Lucid from scratch, there are quite some articles online to choose from. I found most of them involve compiling, only highlight 1 aspe...
HAProxy Logging in Ubuntu Lucid
At Transloadit we use HAProxy "The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer" so that we can offer different services on 1 port. For instance, depending on the h...
Run Node.js as a Service on Ubuntu
The core of our new project runs on Node.js. With Node you can write very fast JavaScript programs serverside. It's pretty easy to install Node, code your program, and run it. But...
Install the Best Coding Font
If you are in IT professionally (coding or sysadmin) you will be staring at monospaced fonts for many many hours a day. So it's probably justified to spend 2 minutes picking a very...
Fix Flash Problems on Ubuntu
I had some difficulties playing Flash videos lately. Problems ranged from lagging sound, to ugliness, to idling black screens, to strange gray Play buttons that didn't do anything....
Search for a Package With apt-file
Recently I needed ogg123 on an Ubuntu server to convert some media. Naturally, I wanted to use aptitude to install it, but I didn't know what package it was in. Now, you can always...
How Virtualization Will Improve Your Code
Good testing will result in better code. If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. This has to do wit...
Disable Snapping Windows in Compiz-Fusion
Running compiz-fusion for some time, one thing started to annoy me. Snapping windows. The first thing I obviously looked for was the Snapping Windows Plugin. But that was already d...
Fit More on One Screen Using DPI
A couple of years ago when everyone still had giant CRT monitors, resolutions of 1600x1200 were pretty common. Nowadays however 19" TFT monitors often cannot scale higher than...
Restore Packages Using dselect-upgrade
It's always a good idea to backup important data. Your files and settings can easily be archived. But how can you backup & restore all applications that you've installed over t...
Schedule Automatic Updates on Ubuntu
Making sure your system is up to date is a key attribute to it's security. Furthermore Ubuntu releases updates pretty often and you probably don't want to miss out on added stabili...
Block Brute Force Attacks With Iptables
Since 2005 there has been an immense increase in brute force SSH attacks and though Linux is pretty secure by default, it does not stop evil programs from indefinitely trying to lo...
Make SSH Connections With PHP
Not everyone knows about PHP's capabilities of making SSH connections and executing remote commands, but it can be very useful. I've been using it a lot in PHP CLI applications tha...
Create Turbocharged Storage Using tmpfs
Everyone knows that RAM is so much faster than a hard disk. To illustrate, while a current SATA disk has peak transfer rates of 375 MB/s, current RAM can do a mind blowing 12,500 M...
Install Squid & Apache on 1 Server
Let's say your site is becoming a big success and as a result it's becoming slower and slower. There are several things you do without buying additional hardware: