Author: halfgaar

http://www.halfgaar.net/

Halfgaar is Wiebe. Wiebe is a contributing author on this weblog. He also has a lot of stuff (such as long, in-depth articles) on his personal website.

Generating a self-signed SSL certificate

This article explains nicely how to make a self-signed SSL certificate, for Apache for instance: Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on May 16, 2010, at 23:05 | No comments

Aligning partitions with RAID and LVM on drives with 4 kB sectors

Hard disks are being released that abandon the long-established standard of 512 byte sectors. I just got two Western Digital WD15EARS ones, which uses 4 kB sectors. Western Digital Refers to this as "Advanced Format". This poses some serious problems. I will describe those, and what I did to 'solve' it. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on May 13, 2010, at 19:05 | No comments

Installing Arch Linux on RAID+LVM

I just installed Arch Linux on a RAID1+LVM, which involved some work. There already is a nice article about it, but I wanted to summarize for myself. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on May 13, 2010, at 18:05 | No comments

Disabling Intellipark on the WD15EARS

I just got two Western Digital 1.5TB WD15EARS disks. This drive has a feature called intellipark, which parks the head after the disk is not used for a while. This is supposedly a power saving feature. But, as someone explains, it can also severely decrease the lifetime of your drive. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on May 13, 2010, at 14:05 | 1 comment

Upgrading Samba from Lenny-backports

For some reason, after upgrading to the Samba version from Lenny-backports I needed to support Windows 7 profiles, the workstations suffered from severe problems. The entire profile seemed to be read-only, even though they weren't on disk. I couldn't change any setting and reverting profile configuration from backups didn't help. In the end, the only thing that fixed it was recreating the user profile, both server and client side. This was an upgrade from 3.2.5 to 3.4.7. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on March 29, 2010, at 13:03 | No comments

Adding a virtual network interface on Debian

When clustering machines, you make it possible for a failover node to be accessible on the same address as the primary node by having a virtual network interface. In Debian, you can add one like this: Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on March 26, 2010, at 17:03 | No comments

Preventing the creation of $RECYCLE.BIN on Samba shares by Windows 7

Windows 7 kept creating a $RECYCLE.BIN dir on the network share. This in itself is merely annoying, but there were also errors resulting from it. Whenever a file would be deleted, this message would appear (translated from dutch): "The recycle bin is damaged, do you want to delete the contents?" Everything froze until that question was answered. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on March 25, 2010, at 14:03 | No comments

MAC address space for Xen

The MAC address space reserved for Xen is 00:16:3e:xx:xx:xx. Source.

Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on March 24, 2010, at 11:03 | No comments

Show fields in a SSL certificate with openssl

To use OpenSSL to get the certficate information (source): Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on March 23, 2010, at 13:03 | No comments

Configuring Thunderbird to have newest mails at the top by default

Thunderbird sorts its mails in such a way that the newest mails are at the bottom of the list by default. You can change it, but you have to change it for each folder separately, which sucks. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on March 22, 2010, at 17:03 | No comments