I’ve recently started diving into home automation stuff, and of course immediately ran into issues. I purchased a z-wave water sensor and planned to use Home Assistant to monitor the sensor and send me alerts (via pushover) if it detects…
Tag: linux
Compiling Bitcoin on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)
In case you don’t know, Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency or as the site says a “peer-to-peer network based digital currency”. While most people have been content to use the pre-compiled binaries available, some of us prefer to compile the…
5 Tips On Being An Effective Linux Admin
Earlier this week someone did something very bad, and it got me thinking about what are some of the simple things that make someone an effective Linux admin. While I will not tell you that following my advice will make…
FAIL: Why you should ALWAYS use visudo
It’s time for a short rant about proper Linux administration. Someone, who shall not be named, manually edited the /etc/sudoers file and broke it on a critical server. In case you don’t know, on Linux sudo allows you to run…
Firefox 3.5: Impatiently Waiting
In case you have been living under a rock, Firefox 3.5 came out today (well technically yesterday). I’ve noticed a lot of people wondering how they can get it running smoothly on Ubuntu. Never fear, after much trial and error…
Tweaking Nagios For Performance
The company I work for has about 3,000 servers that need to be monitored in our Dallas datacenter. For the past few years we’ve been using a fairly standard Nagios setup. If you don’t take the time to really learn…
Cooling Off
I’ve been running Ubuntu 9.04 beta on my desktop at home for a few weeks now, so I decided it was time to upgrade my laptop. I hoped that by upgrading, I’d be able to signifigantly reduce the time it…
Birth of a Monster
Sometimes I like to stay late at work, I’ve got a nice desk, a decent computer, and a mini-fridge full of drinks right behind me. So even after I’m off work, I sometimes stay up here and work on side…