If you are starting virtual machines via libvirt, and you have attached them to the default network, there is a very simple method you can use to determine the address assigned to your running instance:

• Libvirt runs dnsmasq for the default network, and saves leases in a local file (/var …

I decided to take a look at Arch Linux this evening. It's an interesting idea, but has a long way to go:

• The installer configured the wrong root= command line into my syslinux configuration, resulting in a system that wouldn't boot.

Update: As far as I can tell, the syslinux-install_update …

I'm been writing a provisioning tool for OpenStack recently, and I've put together a demo configuration that installs a simple cluster consisting of three backend nodes and a front-end http proxy. I needed a way for the backend servers to discover the ip address of the frontend server. Since in …

I needed to replace the native OpenJDK based Java VM with the Oracle Java distribution on one of our CentOS servers. In order to do it cleanly I wanted to set up the alternatives system to handle it, but it took a while to figure out the exact syntax.

For …

I recently embarked upon a quest to categorize a year's worth of trouble tickets (around 15000 documents total). We wanted to see what sort of things are generating the most work for our helpdesk staff so that we can identify areas in which improvements would have the biggest impact. One …