Lazy Linux Admins Going to Server Rooms Less: Forced Reboot, Auto Reboot after Kernel Panic and Email Notification after Reboot

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Having to go the the server room to reset servers is the most headache thing for admins managing a cluster of Linux servers in a remote site. Either you can ping the server but can not ssh to it, or you even can not ping it. There are various reasons that may cause a Linux
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Improving Fedora Font Rendering with Open Software and Fonts Only

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It is continuously discussed that some Fedora users do not like the font rendering in Fedora Linux and there are solutions to improve the font rendering with potentially non-free or non-licensed software/fonts. However, with only the open source fonts and software and little tricks, the font rendering on Fedora can be quite good. In this
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How to Install, Run and Uninstall VMware Player and VirtualBox on Fedora Linux

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VMware Player and VirtualBox are two cool and free full virtualization solutions and both can run on top of a Linux host. In this post, I introduce how to install, run, and uninstall VMware Player and VirtualBox on Fedora Linux. VMware Player Install VMware Player Download the installation bundle from VMware’s website. For example, the
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Improving ssh/scp Performance by Choosing Suitable Ciphers

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Update on Oct. 9, 2014: You should be aware of the possible security problems of blowfish and it is suggested not to be used. Instead, you may consider ChaCha20 as suggested by Tony Arcieri. To use this with OpenSSH, you need to specify the Ciphers in your .ssh/config files as chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com possibly with another default
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Favorite Sayings by John Ousterhout – Precious Experience and Advice for Building Systems

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John Ousterhout is a professor of Deparment of Computer Science from Stanford University. One recent project he is working on is the RAMCloud, a “new class of storage, based entirely in DRAM, that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than existing storage systems”. He posts his “Favorite Sayings” on his homepage. These sayings are precious
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How To Enable GNOME Classic Mode in Fedora / CentOS / RHEL Linux

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GNOME 3.8 introduces the classic mode: Classic mode is a new feature for those people who prefer a more traditional desktop experience. Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies, it adds a number of features such as an application menu, a places menu and a window switcher along the bottom of the screen. Each of these
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HP Compaq BIOS Crisis Recovery from a Failed BIOS Flashing Using a USB Flash Disk

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I tried to flash my HP Compaq CQ35-240TX’s BIOS to F.15 but unfortunately failed. The computer turned to white screen. When I restarted (powered off then boot again), this is no response any more: the hard disk and caps lock’s LED keep blinding. I thought “Oh my God! I must send it to HP to
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RGBlite WordPress Theme

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About RGBlite Theme RGBlite Theme is a simple and light-weight theme for WordPress. RGBlite Theme provides a green-red-blue mixed style, bright view and fast rendering experience to the users. RGBlite Theme passes W3C XHTML 1.0 and W3C CSS level 3 validation. This theme works well on WordPress 2.9.x and WordPress 3.0. RGBlite theme is among
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Speeding Up Firefox in Linux

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Firefox can be much faster on Linux! Let’s speed up Firefox on Linux system. Part 1 and 2 only config firefox, so it can also be used on other platform such as Windows. 1. Pipe-lining network connection Most of us use a broad band width network, then why not pip line the connection from Firefox?
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Guake: An Excellent Quake Like Drop-down Terminal for Gnome

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Guake is very fast and stable enough for use. It’s an excellent quqke like drop-down terminal for gnome. I used yakuake on KDE. It’s professional but a bit slow. I used tilda also on gnome. But unfortunately, there are too many bugs. Then after I find Guake, I am happy. Guake is invoked with a
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An I/O Performance Comparison Between loopback Backed and blktap Backed Xen File-backed VBD

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I have done some I/O performance benchmark test of Xen DomU. For easier management, some of our DomU VMs are using file-backed VBDs. Previously, our VMs are using Loopback-mounted file-backed VBDs. But blktap-based support are recommended by Xen community. Before considering changing from loopback based VBD to blktap based VBD, I have done this performance
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Howto: Git Server over SSH

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Git and SSH are both powerful tools, and git/ssh work well together. We introduce how to set up git server via ssh in this post. Git server through SSH is easy and fast to set up, although every user will have access to all repositories in the git server over SSH and every user is
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Conferences on Cloud Computing 2013

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This post lists important conferences related to Cloud Computing in year 2013. SOSP 2013 SOSP’13: The 24th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. November 3-6, 2013, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, Pennsylvania. The biennial ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles is the world’s premier forum for researchers, developers, programmers, and teachers of computer systems technology. Academic and
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