The fine folks over at ServeTheHome have done a fantastic job documenting the Dell C6100. This is a rather interesting system because:

1. It packs quite a bit of compute power into 2U for colocation
2. They are surprisingly cheap on the secondary markets

I'll lead you over to the ServeTheHome blog …

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I'm doing a presentation/Q&A for Software Freedom Day 2010 in Charleston, SC. CSCLUG is putting on the event.

• Software Freedom Day 2010 - Gentoo Linux Presentation - .odp / Open Office Impress
• Software Freedom Day 2010 - Gentoo Linux PDF - .pdf / Portable Document Format

Here is the presentation. Feel free to use …

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I did some minor updates to boo2pdf. Graphics should now be within the page margins. Please let me know if there are any other common formatting mistakes.

Unfortunately, IBM's "transmogrifier" utility doesn't work very well in Wine, so you should preprocess older books in Windows before running them through the …

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I've just uploaded a beta of boo2pdf, an IBM BookManager to PDF conversion app & web service. I'm currently experimenting with the HTML to PDF backends and would like feedback with book files I haven't tried. Once the code is cleaned up, I will dump it on my site.

Motivation

I …

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A while back, a book entitled JavaScript: The Good Parts made waves on the internet, especially social networking sites. This book purported to show the inner beauty of a language that was long considered second or third rate, coming of age. With the advent of toolkits like JQuery, Javascript/AJAX …

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The recent bruhaha surrounding Xen on LKML (http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/2/475) is really disheartening. Essentially, the Linux kernel devs are at a disconnect with users. Some are proposing narrow-minded ideas such as DROPPING software paravirt or merging Xen as a whole into the kernel.

I use …

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I dream of a day where virtualization is pervasive.

Instead of thinking about services in terms of servers, CPUs or directly mapped resources, I should be able to to add virtual machines in terms of guaranteed throughput rate over a whole grid. Scaling out should be as easy as adding …

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Here's how you upgrade to ext4. The process is pretty easy, but requires an fsck which means unmounting or rebooting if the file system is in use.

Make sure you are using at least e2fstools 1.41.3 and kernel 2.6.28 (or a vendor kernel with latest ext4 …

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1. Buy Old Computers
2. ???
3. Profit

What is retrocomputing?

I define retrocomputing [wikipedia] as the collecting and use of old computers. Why might one do this? Well, for one, enterprises cycle out machines fairly frequently. 2,3,4 and 5 year old systems are often sent out to scrappers in droves despite …

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Building your own Network Attached Storage server

In an earlier post, I discussed what was necessary to cable 1U servers up with power to run SATA drives. Next, you'll need some drives and a controller if you have not already purchased them.

Controllers

The SATA controller you select is one …

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