I just tried using FreeNX instead of X port forwarding with SSH. The problem with X port forwarding is that if your SSH connection dies for any reason, you lose your X session. You can use the ’screen’ program inside an xterm (or just in SSH directly) for console-style programs, but that doesn’t [...]

I bought a factory-refurbished Epson Stylus R300 printer a while back primarily because it is able to print directly onto CDs and DVDs, which is much nicer than using paper labels or a Sharpie. Up until now I’ve been using the supplied Windows software to do that (using my computer at work, I don’t [...]

Suppose you’re writing a C program and want to open a file and read some data. The obvious way to do this is to use the C stdio library, which isn’t terribly well designed, but is at least standard. And it will for the most part work the same on Linux, Unix, and [...]

The ssh problem I reported a little while ago was actually a general network performance problem affecting all TCP connections to non-local hosts. Rebooting the server fixed that problem and the Wordpress problem.
I don’t understand what was wrong, nor why rebooting fixed it. I don’t like mysterious problems that go away when you [...]

If I ssh from home or work to my new colo server running Fedora Core 5 (64-bit), the input side of the ssh session is painfully slow. If I type command lines fast, they echo back very slowly, one character at a time. Output, on the other hand, comes back at reasonable [...]

I moved this blog to a new system, which has a more up-to-date versions of all the software. It still basically works, but is really slow, despite running on a faster computer. All of the other services running on the new computer show a performance improvement over the old computer, rather than a [...]

I’m slowly migrating the various services running on my old server (running Fedora Core 3, 32-bit) to a new dual Opteron server (FC5, 64-bit).
In general, moving email services is causing the most hassle, because in the process I’m converting from Qmail to Postfix. However, I’m finding various little gotchas with almost everything I move [...]

A friend who shall remain nameless wrote:
I’m a bit nervous about it because everytime I tried Postfix at home, I couldn’t get it to work for one reason or another. Sendmail is ugly but it has always worked for me.
I replied:
That’s bizarre. For me, Postfix has always “just worked”, while I’ve *never* been [...]

Some time back I set up a new server machine running Fedora Core 4 x86_64, with Postfix as the MTA, and with the Mailman mailing list manager. I have a very slightly nonstandard Postfix setup, with recipient_delimiter set to a hyphen character (”-”) instead of the default plus character (”+”), in order to ease [...]

S3 has just released their Chrome S27 graphics chip, and cards are starting to become available. This brings them back into a competitive position with ATI and NVidia.
ATI and NVidia will not open-source their drivers for X.org, the open-source X server used on most Linux systems, nor will they publish documentation allowing third-party drivers to [...]