The growth of big-box computer retailers does not fully explain the demise of small shops.

May 10, 2016 • Read more…

Spotlight searches on my Macbook Pro running OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite) were failing. Worse, the smart mailboxes in Apple Mail weren’t working. Without smart folders, it takes me a lot longer to navigate my inbox every morning.

The solution was to force OS X to re-index my hard drive.

May 04, 2016 • Read more…

The end of a quirky era.

April 11, 2016 • Read more…

Why a dog makes a great narrator for detective fiction.

April 11, 2016 • Read more…

A script to avoid Adium timeouts in MacOS.

April 04, 2016 • Read more…

The problem, briefly: Apache configured to authenticate via LDAP and authorize access only to members of a certain group, would not authorize a new user account that was clearly a member of that group.

The solution, briefly: The new user account had its primary group identifier (GID) set to the authorized group, while all other users were auxiliary members. The new user account had to be given an explicit memberUid entry within the group’s LDAP definition.

March 17, 2016 • Read more…

I’ve been playing with OpenStack at work, getting ready for a pilot project that, if approved, will launch in a couple weeks. I hope to have more entries on OpenStack installation, configuration, and usage later. Today, however, I began experimenting with cloud-init scripting and customizing a stock OpenStack VM image.

July 20, 2016 • Read more…

The Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator is a very nice tool for anyone who’s responsible for configuring a web server for SSL operations.

January 15, 2016 • Read more…

Someone at work encountered an interesting obstacle today. The problem was how to change ownership of files in transit to an NFS filesytem that squashed activity by user root. Solving it required a quirky shell one-liner that you may find interesting.

November 18, 2015 • Read more…

I’ve maintained this site since 2002, and it had essentially the same layout from 2004 until recently (November 2015). It was time to redo it.

March 16, 2023 • Read more…

In the vein of my post about an SSH login function I’ve added to my bash profile, here’s another profile function, this one for invoking ipmitool.

September 28, 2015 • Read more…

A bash function for lazy ssh users.

September 23, 2015 • Read more…

Red Hat and CentOS kickstart are difficult with unpredictable interface names. A workaround.

January 07, 2015 • Read more…

Getting Fedora 21 to work with Engine 3.4.4 took some work.

December 19, 2014 • Read more…

Getting the right fail2ban timeout for your rules.

December 10, 2014 • Read more…