Cute. Nice car, not so practical anymore. 🙂

From April’s Linux Format in the "Mailserver" column:

Reader’s letter:

I fail to understand why Linux Format keeps dismissing and talking down Gentoo Linux. I note that the latest issue has yet another dig at it [Gentwho?, Distrowatc, LXF89]. I have been using Gentoo for about two years, and my only regret is that I did not discover Gentoo earlier – there is no way I would go back to any other distros I’ve tried with the problems of finding compatible dependencies. You imply that it takes a long time to install Gentoo. That is true, but if one considers the time spent in uninstalling unwanted programs and finding dependencies for other distros, then that is a small consideration. As for the difficulty of installing… It couldn’t be simpler if one takes the time to read the manual carefully. One does wonder if your magazine’s reluctance to endorse the system is due to the fact that Gentoo users have little use for the software included on the discs you issue with the magazine and are less likely, therefore, to buy it?

 – Graham Young, Nottingham, England 

LXF reacts: 

How would we "endorse" Gentoo? By writing about it? Oh, we already do that… Er, by putting it on our (apparently redundant) coverdisc? No, we do that too. Hmm. I have an idea: we could print a massive poster extolling the virtues of the system. In fact, we just have – you are holding it right now. In the true spirit of the Gentoo build-it-yourself culture, you need to do a bit of work yourself, but it’s easy if you follow these simple instructions: 1) cut out all the individual words from any 20 pages of the magazine. 2) Boil down the spine binding to acquire some glue. 3) Lay the remaining pages flat and glue on the words in the correct order to make an inspiring message. (NB for a stage 3 poster only, you can simply take a big marker pen and draw on the pages yourself.) 

Standard Gentoo-fanboy post, thoroughly torn down by LXF.

 I should put one of these on my desk… Let’s see how many questions I still get then 🙂

Got my Fosdem LPI exam results earlier today… 620 points! (500 required to pass). That’s an average of just a little over 75%. Yay ! 🙂

Internet Explorer thought Seamonkey’s icon was a lot nicer it seems… 😉 

A note to employers .

Nice reading, beginning of the post is quite similar to "Time management for System administrators " intro text. Geeks live and breathe "geek". 🙂 

If you’re running Debian Sarge, have a >2TB ext3 volume and your fsck.ext3 exits with signal 11 leaving the damn thing all dirty and stuff, get 1.39+1.40-WIP from backports.org . This fixed the problem for me on my home box (2.4T) and one of the servers here at work (4.7T). Takes a long while to fsck, but at least it gets through instead of crashing somewhere half way!

– ext2 doesn’t have a journal 

– ext3 is so "default". AND it gets b0rken just as well; on my home fileserver there were errors and fsck.ext3 exited with a SIGSEGV. Yikes. Upgrading to the 1.39-1.40 release from Sarge backports made that go away, luckily, but it’s still icky that it just broke like that and kept on humming along at the same time.

– XFS turned out to be really, really slow with many small files.

– ReiserFS only gave me corruption, headache and a murderer as an author 😉

– ZFS? Quoting Andrew Morton, "I haven’t seen a patch for that yet, but it’s very welcome!" 

What to do, what to do… 

Help this friendly man get his bike back . 🙂

Yummy 🙂 This is Dedibox ‘s colocation facility. They put 2 Via 2000+ CPU boards in custom 1U rack chassis, and lots and lots of them; and offer el cheapo dedicated servers.