Bloggers and Security

BlogSecurity is reporting that a recent test showed 98% of WordPress blogs are running on a version of the software with known vulnerabilities. While the ones here on wordpress.com are certainly kept up to date, how about the thousands running on private servers?

3 Things in Linux you should NOT Install

While I’m all for promoting the use of Linux and software on Linux, unless you absolutely know what you’re doing, there are certain things you should not install. Entirely too often, I see people on LinuxQuestions.org asking how to configure one of these or why they will not work. So, in no particular order, 3 Things you should NOT Install:

Community Colocation Project

Several cities have a “community colocation project”, such as the San Francisco Community Colocation Project. I feel that Atlanta is in a perfect place to join this movement.

Community colocation projects (CCPs) are a non-profit datacenter for non-profity entities and individuals. This would be a great opportunity for an advancement of Open source projects and for the community in Atlanta and the metro area. Atlanta is the center of high-tech development for the Southeastern United States, and as such, should become a leader in the Open Source arena.

Thoughts and comments are appreciated.

Storage Management

My desktop has a fair amount of storage (~700GB) and a lot of that is in use with multimedia and the like. For example, many of my favorite IPTV shows (Hak.5, DL.TV, etc.) find their home on my desktop computer.

In order to manage this flood of multimedia, I have a jfs filesystem mounted as /multimedia. Today I wanted to import about 10GB of music that “escaped” iTunes on my windows laptop. In doing so, I completely filled my existing /multimedia partition. Ordinarily, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it? Not with LVM

LVM, or Logical Volume Management, divides hard drive space up into a number of chunks (extents) that can be allocated (on-demand) to given virtual partition. The only downside is that the filesystem on the partition must support resizing. Most filesystems (well, most Linux filesystems) take to resizing larger very well. Some do not shrink as well.

So, to give myself another 20G of multimedia was a simple:

umount /multimedia
lvextend -L220G /dev/MainVG/VideoLV
mount -o resize /multimedia

Imagine trying to expand space on a 200G partition without LVM.  I think most people would have just symlinked in more data, or split the data onto two partitions.