Saving Power on Your Custom Home NAS
Spin down those hard drives! Here's a simple way to configure that on your home custom Linux NAS server.
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Monitoring a Galera Cluster WSREP Status
Nagios can easily monitor your Galera cluster status with a simple nrpe configuration.
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How to bulk convert FLAC to MP3 at the command line
Sometimes you just gotta break out the console if you want to do big jobs with a minimum of time involved. Here's how to convert FLAC files into MP3
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Ubuntu Trusty Upgrade and Bluez
Upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 may result in horrible failure. One of them may be related to ia32-libs and/or bluez.
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Deploy Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop Using PXE
This has to be the most poorly documented feature of Ubuntu ever. The more I use it the more I wonder if they aren't losing their focus for corporate use completely. It's almost enough to make me want to play with CentOS. With Ubuntu 12.04 Precise, you were able to deploy Desktop installations by using some files from the "Alternate Install" disk image and a full desktop image. Since you had…
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Using LDAP to Store SSH Public Keys with SSSD
Previously I used Puppet to manage distributing SSH public keys for our administrative users to each desktop. Now I'm changing that to store their keys in OpenLDAP using SSSD
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Ubuntu 14.04 SSSD and OpenLDAP Authentication
The first major change with 14.04 was great news. Previously in order to have one of my Linux workstations authenticate users against our OpenLDAP directory required that I make changes to multiple PAM configuration files, add LDAP config files and more. It was quite a mess. Under 14.04, you now have the System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) which does it all from a single configuration file.
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It's Elementary My Dear Watson
A friend of mine has switched to Elementary OS and claims it's the best Linux desktop he's ever used. Debian / Ubuntu based but with a lot more focus on the user interface and making it both pretty and useful. http://elementaryos.org/
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Install Canon MG5220 Printer / Scanner in Ubuntu 13.04
I finally got around to setting up my Canon MG5220 printer / scanner in Ubuntu. It was a little challenging just because of a couple of settings and obscurity around how to use it in Linux. First, using this old article, I was able to find, download and install the drivers. The kicker in Ubuntu 13.04 is that they've pretty much nerf'd the printer administration system. Thankfully this printer plays nicely, once you change a setting.
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