Pixelhum

I’ve just moved this website over to a Linode VPS. The experience so far has been brilliant. The Linode control panel is excellent and provides all the facilities you could possibly need. I’d decided to move from shared hosting as I felt I was beginning to outgrow it. I needed more flexibility and what better way to get that flexibility than with a virtual machine!

Add the following to the end of your ~/.bashrc file and you’ll always be in a screen session when you SSH into your box.

#======================================================================
# Auto-screen invocation. see: http://taint.org/wk/RemoteLoginAutoScreen
# if we're coming from a remote SSH connection, in an interactive session
# then automatically put us into a screen(1) session.   Only try once
# -- if $STARTED_SCREEN is set, don't try it again, to avoid looping
# if screen fails for some reason.
if [ "$PS1" != "" -a "${STARTED_SCREEN:-x}" = x -a "${SSH_TTY:-x}" != x ]
then
    STARTED_SCREEN=1 ; export STARTED_SCREEN
    [ -d $HOME/lib/screen-logs ] || mkdir -p $HOME/lib/screen-logs
    sleep 1
    screen -x && clear && exit 0
    if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
        screen && clear && exit 0
    fi
    # normally, execution of this rc script ends here...
    echo "Screen failed! continuing with normal bash startup"
fi
# [end of auto-screen snippet]
# ======================================================================

Replace screen with byobu if you use that.

Remember to use ^a-d to disconnect from your SSH session.

I have decided to start writing a small series of posts based on things I have learnt over the past few years. I run a small group of Linux servers — mostly web application servers running PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL — with a variety of different distributions; some of them are running Gentoo Linux, a couple of others are running Debian or Ubuntu, and I’ve installed Fedora Core 6 on my home server, but the majority of what I’ve learnt (and will talk about here) is universal and will apply equally to all Linux distro’s.

In this article I’m going to cover disk space.

I decided a week ago, while in B&Q, to add a PCI Wireless network card to my main PC. I was originally planning to run cables from the corner of the lounge where the router is located, to the back bedroom where the computers are situated.

Continue reading…

Since buying my Powerbook 6 months ago, I can’t help feeling that Apple products are currently a bit form over function. Don’t get me wrong—I love my Powerbook, and the Mac OS is well designed, slick and easy to use—but it often seems as though features that might seem fundamental in other apps are just left out, perhaps because they want to sell you a ‘Pro’ version with that feature and many others (Quicktime is one good example) or just because said feature ruins the lines of the suit, as it were.