I'm almost done refinishing my mother's kitchen. This blog details some of the work, some problems, and some of the solutions.

Cleaning

I was looking for recipes, and really looking for a represntation of what I make myself, and didn't find it. There was all kinds of stuff, but my recipe tastes Mexican to me.

I wanted to download a file, but we just got this awesome high speed fiber optic internet...

It was just kind of intuitive to me that adding more disks to a RAID 5 array would increase the opportunities for failure, but it never occurred to me that going from 3 disks to 4 disks nearly doubled your chance of failure, but it does. It also didn't occur to me that RAID 1 is more reliable than RAID 5.

This note explains how to install Ubuntu Linux Server on a computer with two hard disks, with RAID 1, so it boots from the array. The entire installation, including partitioning and RAID administration, is done through the installer, and doesn't really require any access to the commands. (This is a work in progress, and we don't have screenshots yet.)

Nothing beats practice. No amount of reading documentation and theory will teach as much as that same material combined with a system to play on. A good tutorial is even better.

This instructional page I just worked through about setting up UCSPI-TLS with Qmail was really good. It has all the steps, and they're numbered and indented. I just think it's a great format for "howto"s, because if you're discussing it with someone else, you can refer to a specific step.

(Just to be fair, I think the SSL cert business is a scam, so there.)

(I'm still setting up my system.)

I got this snazzy used Supermicro server, and after I set it up to run SSH, and I started to configure it, it started to reboot every five minutes.

Parity, in computer data, is a bit that's set or unset so the total number of bits is either even or odd. It's an extra bit, and it's added as a check on the data.

This is a simple (or simplistic) Linux GTK+ application that shows a button panel or "switchboard". Each button executes a script.

This is probably not the "best practice" but it's what I'm doing lately to migrate files between servers, desktops, etc. MS has a tool that uses DFS to migrate data and maintain UNC paths, but, whenever I see systems that map paths to physical data on Windows, I worry.

The usg-50 has a pretty flexible system for saving configurations. From the Maintenance:File Manager:Configuration File screen, you manage your configuration files.

The V1910 switch requires that all configurations be saved, or they'll be lost after a power cycle. I'm sure all users learn this pretty quickly after spending time configuring a switch, and assuming that it was saved into the switch's nvram. They unplug the switch, move it, and then discover all their work is lost.