I cut my teeth at open source software on Old Ironsides, a 2000-vintage 1U PIII/1G server that I bought for $35 back in 2007. That machine is now dead. The BIOS started to hang at a variety of points along the way to loading the OS, blaming a bad CPU speed setting. At first I [...]

My main trouble with UNIX is that I'll go looking for a quick answer, find it, and then somehow still keep digging until I'm utterly stumped, long after I solved the initial problem. Here's one example: On the recommendation of my friend Bálint Érdi, I signed on with Dropbox, and I figured one good use [...]

This really is a note to myself, regarding my FreeBSD setup. I use this section to jot down things that I expect to forget, because I use them rarely. Google is alright, but note-taking won't hurt anything. So here: A couple of days ago PuTTY started to demand password authentication, which it shouldn't, because I [...]

On December 11, 2009 portaudit turned up a problem in a package called libtool-2.2.6a_1. So, as usual, I figured I'd go to whatever port that is, and do a portupgrade. Unfortunately, whereis libtool turned up no such port. What's the rookie accidental admin to do? Take good notes, for one. While dabbling in an unrelated topic [...]

One drawback of a system that's giving you very little trouble is that between bouts of fixing whatever does occasionally go wrong you forget what you're supposed to do. We should all be this lucky, but it's still an annoyance. FreeBSD, for example, will sometimes turn up a damaged package or two in response to [...]

The books I'm reading these days come with examples of code, saved on associated web sites. Sometimes that code is neatly packaged into a zip archive or tarball, with every piece of code sitting in a directory named after the chapter it was referenced in. But other times these web sites have the code sitting [...]

Microsoft makes this free utility called SyncToy. I don't know if it will come standard with Windows 7, but it probably should. It provides a very elegant way to back up your data to an external hard drive or to a Samba share. You can even schedule it to run regularly, say right after you're [...]

It took me long enough to figure this out to be worth documenting. If you use Windows, you can use TortoiseSVN with a local repository, installed by default on C:\svn. But you can also use TortoiseSVN to connect to a remote UNIX repository. They hook up through PuTTY, and the protocol is svn+ssh://. There are [...]

I set up a Subversion server on the FreeBSD box a while back, then didn't do much with it until this past weekend, when Software Carpentry mentioned it. I installed SmartSVN on the Ubuntu box and declared a new repository with a svn+ssh:// protocol. I figured it would make sense, since I connect to the [...]

I set up Samba a while back, and that turned out to be a great way to get stuff I used to keep on separate Windows computers all in one place on the FreeBSD box, as readily accessible as if they were still on the original local hard drives. Now I'd like to do the [...]