It had been months since I had an weired issue with the embedded audio controller of my Gigabyte motherboard. Plugin the headphones on the front panel of my box didn’t mute the output to the speakers, which nullified the purpose of having headphones. I long thought that it was some hardware issue that I would [...]
We all know that passwords sucks, that they are the nightmare of all administrators and security guys. So many hacks have been eased because the victims reused the same password everywhere : email account, forum, bank, critical systems… Sadly, so far, there is even not the beginning of a replacement solution. Passwords will be there [...]
There are many urban legends in the industry. I did believe in one of them : “wiping a disk to properly prevent data restore requires random writes and several passes”. At least until I found this very instructive article, “Disk Wiping – One pass is enough“. Don’t miss the second part which clarifies some points [...]
Wow, this article and especially one of its comments saved my day. My computer crashed and one of the VMware machine hosted on it could not start anymore : “Cannot open the disk ‘path of vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: the specific virtual disk needs repair. Checking on the [...]
Console-Kit spawns 35 threads on my system, which is a waste considering that I use at most 7 vty. But it is definitely useless on a server (you don’t need fast switching stuff). Dbus and Hal are also not useful on a server and consuming resources for nothing. Unfortunately, they are settled with the default [...]
What you need: a good earing smartmontools Indeed, so far, I haven’t found anything better than launching a process making a lot of disk activity. This command just do it: The “short” test will give you a few minutes to carefully listen and select the right disk. Well, it sure is pretty primitive! But do [...]
The other day I stumbed upon a weired piece of software on howtoforge.com : dns-add (code on sourceforge.net). Actually, the purpose of dns-add was very intriguing : update your DNS in one command ! The output should look like this: Who would need it these days where all distros include tools and script to update [...]
