GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

In the Linux operating system, the disks are mounted through labels, instead of device path. This is the most effective approach as the device name and path may change when you boot and thus may create several complications for the system and hence for the user.

So the disks are assigned labels so that the devices may mount up in the correct place. Thus disk labels are the important structure for the access of the Linux volumes. All entries for disks to be mounted at startup are in the file /etc/fstab.

Debian's FreeRadius package is built without support for EAP/TLS/TTLS/PEAP because of the licensing problems of the OpenSSL library. But, if you want to implement 802.1x network authentication with strong security, you'll need it. This is a short tutorial that explains how to build Debian (sid aka unstable) package linked to libssl and with EAP/TLS/TTLS/PEAP support compiled in.

First, download the newest source package (orig.tar.gz), Debian diffs (diff.gz) and description file (dsc) from the freeradius package page. The version I tested the procedure with is 1.1.7-1.

The following paragraph shamelessly stolen from kvm FAQ, but I suppose this information should be quite useful to anybody who is still deciding which product to use.

Xen is an external hypervisor; it assumes control of the machine and divides resources among guests. On the other hand, kvm is part of Linux and uses the regular Linux scheduler and memory management. This means that kvm is much smaller and simpler to use.

kvm only run on processors that supports x86 hvm (vt/svm instructions set) whereas Xen also allows running modified operating systems on non-hvm x86 processors using a technique called paravirtualization. kvm does not support paravirtualization for cpu but may support paravirtualization for device drivers to improve I/O performance.

You've finally made the move to a Windows-free computer, you're enjoying your brand new Linux OS, no trojans/viruses, no slowdown, everything's perfect. Suddenly, you need to update the BIOS on your motherboard to support some new piece of hardware, but typically the motherboard vendor is offering only DOS based BIOS flash utilities. You panic! Fortunately, this problem is easy to solve...

Step 1: Download FreeDOS boot disk floppy image

FreeDOS, a free DOS-compatible operating system, is up to the challenge, no need for proprietary DOS versions. So, all you need is a bootable floppy disk image with FreeDOS kernel on it. We are fortunate that guys at FDOS site have prepared one suitable for us. Use the OEM Bootdisk version, the one with just kernel and command.com, because it leaves more free space on disk for the flash utility and new BIOS image. You can also find a local copy of this image attached at the end of this article. After you download the image, you need to decompress it. In other words:

With a little bit of torturing, and some fun on the way, find out how fast your hard disk drive really is.

Introduction

1-Terabyte hard disk drives are slowly coming to the market, so I suppose we can't complain that we don't have enough space to save (the ever increasing amount of) our precious data. But, it's also a known fact that although disk storage capacities are improving at an impressive rate, disk performance improvements are occurring at a rather slower rate. Unfortunately, larger disk doesn't always mean faster disk. What follows is an explanation of two techniques for measuring disk performance in Linux.

The upcoming 2.6.20 Linux kernel is bringing a nice virtualization framework for all virtualization fans out there. It's called KVM, short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Not only is it user-friendly, but also of high performance and very stable, even though it's not yet officialy released. This article tries to explain how it all works, in theory and practice, together with some simple benchmarks.

Virtualization is a hot topic these days. With hardware getting more and more capable, by means of cheap multi-core processors and gobs of memory, we can expect virtualization to become only more important in the coming years. Virtualization promises reduced costs for IT organizations, both hard (machines, power, cooling) and soft (admin and operations personnel).

There are lots of products on the market already, but two that draw the most attention are open source Xen & VMware family of products. VMware is the pioneer of the virtualization on the industry-standard hardware (having been founded in 1998) and is currently offering many inovative products, some of which are free to download and use. Xen, on the other side, is under heavy development, but is already promising unprecedented levels of performance.

qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent written by D. J. Bernstein. To learn more check qmail home page and qmail resource page.

Some time ago, I asked on the qmail discussion list if there was the mailing list archive in the standard mbox format, but the answer was negative. Good people on the list at least explained me what I was supposed to do. As the mailing list is hosted on the ezmlm mailing list manager, I needed to pull each and every mail message from it, one by one. At a volume of more than 100000 messages it was very demanding, but eventually I did it.