The Hacker Lifecycle.

Came an interesting post titled The Hacker Lifecycle on SlashDot. Thought the best way to bookmark the link is to blog about it.

How to increase your GNU/Linux swap without re-partitioning

1. # dd if=/dev/zero of=idli bs=1000000 count=1

   This will create a file - idli - of approx 1 MB size

2. # chmod 0 idli

   So that no one can ever use it /delete it etc etc

3. # mkswap idli

4. # swapon -v idli

5. Test if your swap has increase by 1 MB

   # top

   or

   # cat /proc/swaps

Obituary

Obituary printed in the London Times…..Absolutely Brilliant !!

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense , who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

– Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
– Why the early bird gets the worm;
– Life isn’t always fair;
– And maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death,
-by his parents, Truth and Trust,
-by his wife, Discretion,
-by his daughter, Responsibility,
-and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 5 stepbrothers;
– I Know My Rights
– I Want It Now
– Someone Else Is To Blame
– I’m A Victim
– Pay me for Doing Nothing

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

Getting Started with Salt Stack-the Other Configuration Management System Built with Python

Getting Started with Salt Stack-the Other Configuration Management System Built with Python: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/getting-started-salt-stack-other-configuration-management-system-built-python

 

Cap Theorm or Brewer’s Theorm and OpenStack Swift

In theoretical computer science, the CAP theorem, also known as Brewer’s theorem states that it is impossible for a distributed computer system to simultaneously provide all three of the following guarantees:

Consistency: All nodes see the same data at the same time.

Availability: A guarantee that every request receives
a response about whether it was successful or failed.

Partition Tolerance: The system continues to operate despite arbitrary message loss or failure of part of the system.

According to the theorm, a distributed system can satisfy any two of these guarantees at the same time, but not all three.Openstack Object Storgage (Swift) chose availability and partition tolerance and dropped consistency. That means that you’ll always get your data, they will be dispersed on many places, but you could get an old version of them (or no data at all) in some odd cases (like some server overload or failure). This compromise is made to allow maximum availability and scalability of the storage platform.

Devstack: Documented shell script to build OpenStack environments

I’ve been using DevStack for quite a while now. DevStack is a documented shell script from RackSpace Cloud Builders to build complete OpenStack development environments. Would recommend it for any developer trying to get OpenStack up and running with minimum fuss. The complete installation instructions are available at http://devstack.org

Ceph is a free/open source distributed file system.

Ceph is a free/open source Software distributed file system Ceph’s main goals are to be Posix-compatible, and completely distributed without a single point of failure.

URL: http://ceph.com/