26 May 2005 mchirico   » (Journeyer)

Writing

Wietse listed my Postfix Tutorial under the Howtos and FAQs, so I feel good about making a small contribution. Reviews have been positive.

openvpn

I've been very impressed with openvpn. The documentation is well written; however, I still think there's room for an article. Specifically, I was thinking of creating a tutorial that would complement the Live Linux CD; but, have openvpn installed, with NFS in conjunction with UnionFS. Perhaps add instructions on compiling GCC? Nothing yet; I'm still in meticulous testing phase.

Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Editon

This book is extremely good, and it's released under the creative commons license. For $65 you can get a Delcom USB device. I've done a simple one here, which may help if you're thinking of doing a 2.6 kernel module for it and need help getting started.

SourceForge

I noticed SourceForge is using Fedora Core 2 for their servers. Interesting, it seems the Red Hat 9.0 and 8.0 users may be gravitating to the Fedora releases. Originally, from companies that I surveyed, there was the issue of on-going support. However, from my personal experience, I prefer working with the 2.6 kernel. I don't want to keep a server running an old version of the OS and dated applications for years. With SourceForge going with Fedora Core 2, it may throw some weight behind this decision as well. True, there is Debian. But, I prefer grub over lilo especially when configuring for software raid. Again true, you can get all of this under Debian, I'm starting to see Fedora pull ahead - just my observation.

Articles

The MySQL Tips is averaging 40 downloads per hour. I think the SQLite Tutorial and Gmail article are more interesting. The Live Linux CD gets a lot of reads from the UK. And Breaking Firewalls generated the most hate mail - seems System Administrators are shutting down port 22 because of this article. I would encourage them to reread and re-think the article before taking such actions. In reality, I think it's just a few people complaining loudly.

Today's Tip

Instead of using ``ps auxf|grep 'someprocess' try the following. For example, suppose you start working with openvpn, and you want to see if it's running.

        ps -fC openvpn
  UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
  nobody   27092     1  0 09:45 ?        00:00:00 openvpn server.conf

I think the above method is cleaner.

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