Jun 11
The following small script has been copied over from madboa.com:
#!/bin/sh
#
# usage: retrieve-cert.sh remote.host.name [port]
#
REMHOST=$1
REMPORT=${2:-443}
echo |\
openssl s_client -connect ${REMHOST}:${REMPORT} 2>&1 |\
sed -ne '/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p'
Apr 28
Initially I wanted to write about my positive experience with kvm+qemu but after several weeks of testing the following downsides became apparent:
- currently no support for AltGr
- no copy-and-paste support to/from host
As those issues actually prevented me from productively using guest images with kvm a colleague had the right hint at hand: Virtualbox.
I went ahead and installed the packages virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-16-generic and started testing it by creating various guest images using the simple to use gui. I even converted an existing kvm/qemu image to the virtualbox format using the following commands:
# vboxmanage convertdd image.img image.vdi
# vboxmanage modifyvdi image.vdi compact
Finally copy-and-paste is actually working, something even VMware never accomplished (at least under a Linux host). The CPU Hardware Virtualization support (see this post to check if your CPU has support for it) in combination with the Virtualbox Guest Extensions make the guests subjectively run even faster than on kvm/qemu (I did not clock this, though).
As you might have guessed from my fanboy rave positive posting I currently favor Virtualbox over all other solutions as it seems the right tool for my exact needs. As always your mileage may vary.
btw: AltGr works too…
–
Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron 32bit
Intel Core 2 Duo T2400 1.83GHz
2GB Ram
Mar 30
Yesterday I finished my first half-marathon in a beautiful net time of 01:58:45 (I would say that’s OK for someone that did not do that much training upfront). Of course this was only possible because I had the excellent pace-makers André and Stefan (www.gute-beine.de) helping me keeping the pace and faith (after 13km my mind started telling my body that it should stop). Thanks guys!

Mar 17
So your binary logs have grown to an ugly size eating up most of your servers disk size? The easiest way to truncate the logs in a proper way is to run the following command:
reset master;
Please note: This command works for MySQL >=5, for older versions use flush master;.
Update: There exists a system variable that would automatically purge binary logs older than a given interval. Excerpt from MySQL documentation:
For the binary log, you can set the expire_logs_days system variable to expire binary log files automatically after a given number of days (see Section 5.1.3, “System Variables”).
Feb 21
Ever tried to get rid of the annoying PC Speaker sound (e.g. when using auto-completion in a shell)? Under Ubuntu (and probably other distributions as well) do the following to bring silence to the masses:
For the running system:
rmmod pcspkr
Forever (aka after a reboot) edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add the following line to the bottom
blacklist pcspkr
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