A new Ubuntu based server I have set up recently had a power failure which unexpectedly resulted in the box not booting again. There were actually two problems: fsck failed on the data mount because one of the data drives apparently had failed. It took forever but eventually prompted for user input "S" to skip … Continue reading headless server fun →

The company I work for recently had the requirement to securely exchange files between several computers, some on site, several others off site. This data consisted in part of sensitive data which is covered by the German Bundesdatenschutzgesetz. Somebody suggested using DropBox because it is so simple to use. I had to deny this request … Continue reading Bittorrent Sync, a secure DropBox alternative →

This is just a list of URLs I found useful while installing an Ubuntu 12.04 server. Ubuntu Network Configuration - needed for changing the IP address to static and configuring DNS Installing Webmin on Ubuntu BTRFS Fun That's it for now, I'll expand this list as I run into other issues.

I just wasted several hours with yet another computer problem. Some Background: We are using a Ubuntu based server which runs Samba as a file server for Windows computers. It also is a local name server and mail server. Yesterday it was that time again that I had to reboot it because of some Linux … Continue reading How to waste hours with computer problems →

I just found this via Heise online: Web server in one line of bash I tried it and it works! while true; do { echo -e 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n'; cat index.html; } | nc -l 8080; done You can replace index.html with any file you happen to want to transfer (also works for binary files). … Continue reading A web server as a shell script – in a single line →

I just had the need to concatenate several pdf files to a single one. Since my desktop computer is running Windows, I first tried to download and use some freeware utility. After the first one did not work as advertised and the second one tried to sideload some adware I stopped going that path and … Continue reading Concatenating pdf files the easy way →

Ever since I switched my Linux server to using ACLs (access control lists) for advanced access rights management I have struggled with rights being set too restrictive on new directories and files. Now it seems that I have solved the issue and this post is meant to remind me how to change the whole directory … Continue reading setfacl woes →