Posts in Lateral Opinion about sysadmin

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years: programming shell scripts suck. They are ugly and error prone. The only reason why we still do it? There is no real replacement. ...

Migrating from Haloscan to Disqus (if you can comment on it, it worked ;-)

2009-12-18 00:37:09

Introduction ...

Yesterday I had one of those moments where I feel very happy about my distro of choice, Arch Linux . Since the last time I posted about Arch seems to have been over two years ago (time flies when you are having fun!), I think it's time to explain it. ...

Outlook, IMAP and Exchange

2009-03-12 22:10:49

Ok, I will post this just in case some poor soul needs to try doing it. You tell me if it makes any sense. ...

A hard-to-block spammer: I need help.

2008-10-20 11:59:53

Many of my clients have been spammed by La Capitana Real Estate lately. And I mean many . Hundreds. ...

Why no packaging software should replace your config files

2008-07-16 11:49:04

When you upgrade a piece of software on Linux, there are two paths it can go when there are incompatible changes in the config files (ok, 3 paths, Debian asks you what to do): ...

Adding MSN notifications to Argus

2008-06-20 14:23:13

I am a user of Argus as a monitoring software. Since it's very flexible and easy to extend, I wanted to add MSN alerts, the same way I had added SMS alerts a while ago. It was easier than I thought! ...

Wine kinda works nowadays

2008-05-12 22:10:11

I had stopped trying to run stuff in WINE a few years ago,because pretty much nothing worked. ...

Pop quiz!

2008-04-15 17:13:36

Q: What happens if you have a SMTPA server, and you have a user called info, and then set its password to info? ...

Linux as a windows crutch: Sending SMS

2008-04-15 16:14:36

Suppose you want to send SMS messages from windows through a bluetooth connection to a phone. ...

This is why Linux is not ready for the desktop

2008-04-04 11:41:37

If you delete the empty directory /var/lib/xkb, then enable the KDE keyboard layout switcher, the up-arrow key works like print-screen. ...

Good News: Linux gives life to old hardware. Bad News: Maybe in some cases it shouldn't.

2008-03-11 14:23:26

I was in one of my customer's datacenters the other day, and while I do most work remotely, I had to take this opportunity to take some snapshots of their proxy server. ...

New qmail plugin idea: overload

2008-03-07 07:43:47

It should not happen but it does: Your qmail server is overloaded. Maybe you are under a DOS attack, or there is a reason why you are getting 10x your usual amount of mail. ...

Yes, Xandros was horrible. But this ubuntu thing is working out nicely!

2008-01-24 17:47:41

As I said before, the bastardized Xandros [1] sucked. In fact, I managed to destroy it. So I decided to switch to another distro. Any distro. ...

No second part of "Rethinking linux configuration" today

2007-11-30 16:40:28

I had to do a vry late night job yesterday, so I am not going to do it right today. Probably wednesday. ...

If you are a qmail user: read this

2007-11-28 15:51:51

- If you don't know what qmail-spp is, please check it out. It makes qmail much much better. ...

Rethinking Linux Configuration: Part I

2007-11-28 14:01:26

I have said Linux sucks. Here's my new project: Make it suck less, one bit at a time. ...

Don't let them tell you the CLI is bad

2007-11-23 20:03:45

I mean, can you do this on a GUI? ...

Wanted: C programmer

2007-11-23 17:32:48

Checking on my semi-dead projects, I found that one was almost finished but I had forgotten about it: rater ...

What I want for christmas (The cool new trend on preloaded Linux)

2007-11-16 14:54:30

Dear fictional character that oppreses the workers of the North Pole: This christmas, I want an Asus eee PC, an Everex gPC, and some bare white box with a nice Phoenix PC 3.0 BIOS. ...

Bash does thing I never suspected.

2007-11-15 16:23:59

Try this and be amazed: ...

Windows XP is popular!

2007-11-13 21:24:19

Or at least my article about it. ...

Windows: my eXPerience

2007-11-13 10:12:14

Can you be a computer consultant and generally a computer guy without ever installing windows? ...

Dropping BIND, at least a little

2007-11-05 12:23:05

One of my customers has about 15000 email accounts. ...

Geek challenge: Backup this thing!

2007-09-13 15:00:19

Here's the scenario: ...

Good experience with VoIP service: Metrotel

2007-08-10 13:06:59

Trying to create a more serious looking infrastructure for my consulting business, I decided I needed a non-mobile phone number, and a way to receive Faxes [1] . While I would use this as a secondary business number, it's just my home phone. ...

Making Linux systems that don't suck. Part II

2007-07-29 12:06:04

Second (or third) article on this series. Now we tackle why and how cron/at suck and what we can do about it. ...

Making Linux systems that don't suck. Part I

2007-07-21 18:48:49

One of the ways your linux system sucks, and what you can do about it: system notifications. ...

I must be doing something right

2007-06-19 11:08:25

Here are the two largest mail servers I manage. They handle over 20K users, with full mail service. ...

Why I use Arch Linux

2007-05-20 22:37:03

I have been an Arch Linux for a while now, and I am still liking it. ...

Small software released: RA-WebPass

2007-05-18 14:25:05

I just released a wee piece of software, called RA-WebPass which is simply a webpage that you can use to change linux system passwords. ...

A KDE hack: Faster mail searches in kmail, using mairix

2007-05-16 11:37:53

Kmail searches slowly. ...

Sometimes I am stupid. Then again, it doesn't matter, because I am lucky!

2007-05-13 21:15:49

I am working on changing BartleBlog so it can be used from scratch. That may sound odd but because I have been using it since day 2 to post this blog, it has grown very organically, meaning there are things that only work because of the way I used it while developing it. ...