I have been spending time in the Gimp making graphics for my wife's web site, so I decided to make a logo for my blog. It is not fancy, just a retro tech font with a transparent background. Here's what it should look like in the header bar for thatlinuxbox.com:

My favorite IRC client is "irssi" because it only requires a shell / terminal window to run.  I can leave it running on a reliable machine and logged into the IRC network for long periods of time. Staying logged into IRC allows me to catch up on recent activity in my favorite channels whether I am at home, at work, or on my Droid.

Many people use "screen" to detach from their remote SSH login sessions and re-attach from a different computer.  I found that screen has some quirks with irssi and tons of features that I do not use.  A simpler alternative to "screen" is "dtach".

Here is how I use dtach:

In a previous story, I showed What NOT to do in your server room. Over the past year I have been able to improve that server room a little bit. In addition to a general rack cleanup effort, I installed a whole new rack with square holes and plenty of cable management. The following pictures show the results.



Here are the racks from the front:

I like to document things that seem to be harder to find on the Internet than expected. One such piece of information I needed the other day was the connection information for a serial console connection to an IBM pSeries server.

Step 1: Dig around in your server room storage bins until you are lucky enough to find a cable labeled "pSeries Serial" like this:



This special console cable plugs into the front of the server. I used a DB-9 serial cable of some variety to extend the cable reach.


Step 1 (alternate): Connect a DB-9 serial cable (possibly just a standard null modem cable) into the Serial 1 port on the rear of the server.


Step 2: Configure your terminal software (such as HyperTerminal on Windows) with the following settings:

Months after purchasing the Acer Aspire One AO751h, I was still looking for a Linux distribution that works well with the embedded (cursed!) Intel GMA 500 graphics drivers, aka Poulsbo. Ubuntu 9.04 or other distributions sourced on Jaunty Jackalope seem to be the easiest to make usable on this hardware but the situation is still far from perfect.

I gave CrunchBang Linux 9.04 a try and am loving it for a netbook operating system. CrunchBang, known as #! for short, uses the Openbox window manager + conky to provide a lightweight and clean desktop environment. One of the great things about the CruchBang distro is that it pulls from the Ubuntu repositories directly, so the expected huge number of software applications are available via the aptitude package management system. I really like the conky "Super key" keyboard shortcuts to start the main applications such as Browser, Terminal, Editor, etc. See the CrunchBang web site for more info (http://crunchbanglinux.org).

The only modifications I made to the system to help compatibility with Linux were the following three fixes taken from the Ubuntu community wiki pages:

While compiling a piece of software from source the other day, I noticed that my CPU was only at about 50% utilization.  This reminded me that the build tools can be set to execute multiple operations simultaneously.

The CONCURRENCY_LEVEL environment variable is used by many tools to determine the number of concurrent jobs to run:

 export CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=3

 It is also possible to tell "make" directly how many simultaneous jobs to run:

 make -j 3

 make --jobs=3

 On a sample dual-core system, this improved my emacs compile time from 2m36s to 1m31s.

As mentioned in thatlinuxbox.com now runs on a Linode, I switched from A2 Hosting to Linode a few weeks ago. The new Linode server is running great so today I canceled my A2 Hosting account.

I ditched A2 Hosting because the low apache MaxClients settings meant my sites were giving 503 errors and when pages did load ok they were generally missing images.

Beware so-called "Unlimited" shared web hosting plans. They are cheap for a reason. The MaxClients setting makes an effective bottleneck to limit site traffic and usage. When I asked A2 Hosting about this problem they suggested that I upgrade to one of their own VPS hosing packages. Um, no thanks. I switched providers instead.

It seems like there is an un-tapped niche in there somewhere. My Linode 360 costs $20 / month. I was paying $6 / month for the A2 Executive Web Hosting Plan. I would have loved to pay $12 for shared hosting that did not suck.

However, now that I'm on a Linode VPS plan I am probably hooked... it is really darn convenient to have my irssi client logged into IRC all the time and available to me anywhere I can get an SSH shell.