There's some various things that I've wanted to have backed up in a reasonable fashion for awhile now. For awhile, I was just backing up stuff to a different machine, but I ran out of space, and ended up deleting my backups.

Earlier this week, I found that Amazon S3 has reasonable pricing for storage.

Over the weekend, I set up my eee to operate as a second front-end for MythTV. This will allow me to watch TV in my bedroom on my eee, which is hooked up to a 19" display. The eee is a bit slow doing some things, frustratingly slow on occasion, but overall, it works fine. It's certainly usable.

Many ISP's these days block outbound SMTP (port 25) from their networks. However, they generally don't block higher ports that are used for encrypted SMTP (port 587). I came across this document that outlines how to set up postfix so you can relay through Gmail's SMTP.

It seems to work pretty well, but you manually have to add the cert's for Gmail's SSL sertificate. On Ubuntu, do the following:

apt-get install ca-certificates

Some guys at work were using Jinzora to manage their music collections at home. I tried it out, but found that it was really really buggy and it really didn't like how I have my web server set up at home (Special port + NAT + SSL). Another co-worker found Subsonic, which does basically the same thing, but in a much better way. The biggest downside to Subsonic is that it's java-based, but, that's not that big of a deal.

If you run most any type of services in a production environment, chances are, you want some sort of redundancy and load balancing. As an example, if you're running a web site, you want that to be up as much as possible, so generally a load balancer is used to send the load between different web servers. A common load balancer used is a big-ip F5. These have a great configuration tool and work very well, but they're also very expensive.

I've been beginning to work on a VMware Virtual Infrastructure project for work lately. Our current installations are pseudo-production, so it's limited as to how much I can mess around with them. I'd read that one of the downsides to VMware workstation 6.5 betas is that it won't run ESX anymore, which led me to consider running Virtual Infrastructure in Workstation to do some testing on things like the DR features and whatnot.

I've been playing Grand Theft Auto IV over the weekend and enjoying it quite a bit. I could never really get into the previous ones that I'd tried - I'm not quite sure why. I'm rather into the story for this one and it's pretty cool.

Here's some things I've found:

There's probably a lot of scenarios in general Unix administration wherein you'd like to create a simple GUI for people to do tasks. This way you can give non-technical people the ability to do things like check printer queues or do add users or whatever. Obviously, writing a shell script with regular text output is one option, but the 'dialog' tool is another.

So, I've started trying to do more exercising lately, and one of the things that's kind of difficult when walking is trying to figure out how far you've walked. You can buy pedometers, but they generally work basically by use of a weighted contraption on a spring that flicks a switch when you walk. With a good one, you can set your stride lengths, so the impact of you hitting the ground makes the counter increment.

One of the things I learned about in my RHCE training was the autofs capabilities in Linux. I'd never used them before, and found they're pretty neat.

Consider the following:

-{ conrad@conrad-laptop }---{ 07:30 PM }-
-[ ~ ]-> df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             32993140   3939496  27377664  13% /
varrun                 1037908       128   1037780   1% /var/run
varlock                1037908         0   1037908   0% /var/lock
udev                   1037908        84   1037824   1% /dev