The twice-a-year release of OpenBSD is out today (More details on Undeadly). You can buy the CD set or get it by FTP (in this case consider donating to the project as CD sales are the main source of income to the project).

Enjoy.

This posts gives a short intro about VLAN and a simple configuration sample on a DELL PowerConnect 5224 switch with an OpenBSD machine.

If you are looking for a procedure to reset the password of a Dell PowerConnect switch, you’ll find it at the Dell support forum in the following thread : PowerConnect Password Recovery Procedure for managed switches.

As far as the 5224 is concerned, you mostly have to hold Ctrl-F from the power-on till the end of the boot of the switch, which will bring the “reset to factory ?” question and solve the problem of the lost password.

MySQL uses the so called binary log files to implement master/slaves replication.

CFEngine can do wonders to keep a cluster in shape, but it can be very useful for a single server as well. Here is a configuration sample to monitor a few common services and restart them should they fail.

If you got the following error in WordPress when saving, auto-saving, or commenting on a post :
Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to submissions.ask.com:80 in /path/to/blog/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1150 then keep reading 😉

A cool feature of WordPress I’ve just discovered : delayed posts.

As you might have noticed, WordPress 2.5 is out, so I’ve just upgraded this blog.

Till now all I can tell is that the admin interface has changed a bit. Oh and there is a system to upgrade plugins with one click, which is way cool. Otherwise pretty much the same good old WordPress.

The upgrade went smoothly, just as for any other previous release and everything seems to be running just fine. However, at the first glance, the blog seems a bit slower than before the upgrade … (maybe this is not related to the upgrade … I’ll have to check this out).

I ran into this into the following article, “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits“. This article is mainly common sense, but there are interesting points, such as :

• avoid piping when you can, in order to save performance (the classical construct grep | wc to count the lines is useless as most versions of grep can count with grep -c)
• use awk to “grep” on a specific field of a line with “… | awk ‘$1 == “XXX”‘ which is cool and I never use
• the find | xargs construct (I’d add “find -print0 | xargs -0”, useful if your find brings back filenames with a space inside …)

All in all it is worth a reading, if only to refresh your memory.

I currently manage all my X10 home automation with MisterHouse which is a fantastic tool but is a bit on the heavyweight side. Plus you need to know a bit of Perl to take full advantage of it.

If you are looking for something simpler to use, you might want to consider HEYU.