Chris Searle

The Pro series of NAS from ReadyNAS (Netgear) support iSCSI out of the box. But the NV+ 4disk unit does not. However - a third party plugin is available. Let's look at what is needed to get iSCSI connections between the ReadyNAS NV+ and an iMac running Snow Leopard.

Technorati Tags: iscsi linux mac network attached storage osx readynas snow leopard

My glassfish process kept dying with "Too many open files" in the log.

I'm not surprised that it has too many - it has quite a few large applications running - but how to increase this?

ulimit -n shows that the user has a default of 1024.

Technorati Tags: debian glassfish linux ulimit

As part of Building a debian firewall on a CF card I was trying to make sure that disk writes to the firewall CF card were kept to a minimum.

However - I've never really been able to test this. So I was pleased to find http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/faq - under section 5 there is a question titled "My disk spins up all the time and I have no clue what causes this. Can I debug this?".

Technorati Tags: debian firewall linux

A good source of entropy is needed for random number generation. This affects services that go via SSL amongst other things.

However - in 2.6.x kernels the entropy sources of a system were reduced - as far as I can see it now is only affected by keyboard, mouse and some IRQ interrupts.

Technorati Tags: debian entropy linux rng-tools

I currently have an OpenBSD firewall running on an ancient 586. I have a mini-itx board, CF/IDE converter and a CF card and have been intending to upgrade.

However - rather than OpenBSD I'm going to try for debian (since I know that much better).

This post will end up being a "how I did it" - but at the minute is just a collection of the notes I'm grabbing for now.

Technorati Tags: bind bind9 debian dhcp dns firewall iptables linux

mplayer works best with the real time clock (rtc) device /dev/rtc. It also wants to be able to set frequency up to 1024 as a user.

First make sure the rtc module is loaded - one way is to add rtc to /etc/modules

Now - lots of places I see the recommendation to add

echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq

to your startup scripts. I've never been sure where to hack this in - and the people who are giving the advice have many different suggestions. The whole thing feels like a bad hack.

So - after some investigation - I feel that it is much better to use sysctl - by adding the following to /etc/sysctl.conf

Technorati Tags: linux mplayer sysctl

Note to self - here's the tar command you keep having to lookup

cd /path/to/source
tar lcvf - .|(cd /path/to/dest; tar xpvf - )

Technorati Tags: linux tar

Just a note to self - to generate a new certificate

openssl req -new -key /etc/ssl/private/keyfile -x509 -days nnn -out /etc/apache2/ssl/certfile

Technorati Tags: apache2 linux ssl

The dnslookup section of the exim4 config contains

# ignore private rfc1918 and APIPA addresses
ignore_target_hosts = 0.0.0.0 : 127.0.0.0/8 : 192.168.0.0/16 :\
172.16.0.0/12 : 10.0.0.0/8 : 169.254.0.0/16

To allow one specific subnet thru change it:
# ignore private rfc1918 and APIPA addresses
ignore_target_hosts = !192.168.3.0/24 : 0.0.0.0 : 127.0.0.0/8 : 192.168.0.0/16 :\
172.16.0.0/12 : 10.0.0.0/8 : 169.254.0.0/16

Here it allows the 192.168.3.x network.

Technorati Tags: dns exim4 linux

Running xfce4 - and have no gnome control panel - but I needed to change the default browser.

gconftool -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http
gconftool -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/https

will tell you what is set - in my case "epiphany %s"

I tend to use opera - so

gconftool -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http -t string 'opera -newpage %s'
gconftool -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/https -t string 'opera -newpage %s'

did the trick

Technorati Tags: gnome linux xfce