Operating Systems ⁽¹¹⁾

Brian Bilbrey July 20, 2014

Cool July

We've had several days of unseasonably cool weather. I'm not complaining, mind you. But all the same, it's weird. Temps in the early mornings in the high 50's, and barely breaking into the low 80's. Who'd a thunk? But they let me take Lexi on a two mile walk this afternoon without arriving back home as a sweatball holding a dead dog. The garden, it fares poorly. I gave it virtually no attention in the days leading up to Marcia's surgery, nor in the weeks that followed that event. Bugs have killed my zucchini plants, the tomato plants are small-ish…

Brian Bilbrey November 9, 2013

Six Days of LISA '13

Howdy. My name's Brian, and I'm a tired SysAdmin... So, six days of tutorials and talks at the USENIX LISA '13 conference are done. And it was good. My behind is, however, glad to be shut of those hotel conference chairs. Sunday, 3 November Sunday's full day tutorial was called Securing Linux Servers, and was taught by Rik Farrow, a talented bloke who does security for a living, and is Editor of the USENIX ;login: magazine on the side. We covered the goals of running systems (access to properly executing services) and the attacks that accessibility (physical, network) enable. As always,…

Brian Bilbrey May 11, 2013

Finishing a cabinet; Ch-ch-ch-changes a'coming.

Finishing the corner cabinet I'm making progress, as you can see. This cabinet may be upstairs as early as Wednesday of the upcoming week. Depends if I can get enough coats of poly on the doors and shelves. Pictured above, I'm at the poly stage for the face and insides - the dark teal sides are already three coats and cured. After supper, I took those down, laid out the doors and shelves, and first-coated the backs. Tomorrow, a quick sanding and I'll get the second coat on. * * * While I am not going to have the liberty…

Brian Bilbrey November 22, 2012

Moving right along

First, for US visitors, Happy Thanksgiving. A weird holiday, to be sure, but it's always good to be thankful for life, family, friends, and first world problems. * * * I'm posting from Linux again, for the first time in a long while. I'd been trying a variety of solutions for storage here, answers that didn't involve running a full-size system 24x7. I couldn't do it. You see, it isn't good enough to just back stuff up here at home. I'm not going to backup home data on a cloud somewhere on the Internet - our friendly government doesn't appear…

Brian Bilbrey November 18, 2012

Marcia's back (again) & Linux reloaded

Today, I relaxed a bit. Shopping in the morning, a bit of Top Gear UK during the day, and I picked Marcia up at BWI around 1500 EST. Happy dog is happy, and so am I. The holiday bird is in the fridge, I've got a tray of mac-n-cheese ready, and ... we'll see how the table ends up. Tonight, I blew out the FreeNAS installation, and installed Scientific Linux 6.3 x64 on the box still known as Serenity. I had a lot of trouble getting things working right, and there are issues with offsite backups that are much more…