As I was browsing the Gentoo forums today, I came across a very interesting post.
A user had 2 partitions on different hard drives that he wanted to combine the space on. Ok, well the interesting part was one persons reply about a new fuse filesystem called mhddfs. He pointed out an article on debian.net that explained a bit about this new filesystem and how to use it.
Sure, there’s multiple ways to combine the two drives, but this one is pretty intesting. You can use mhddfs to combine 2 partitions into one virtual partition. Mhddfs will automatically merge (overlay) the contents of both partitions so it looks like one big partition.
The advantages are:
- No need to move and backup existing data on the partitions.
- Easily implemented in fuse.
- Allows a regular user to mount and unmount the filesystem.
According to the forum thread poster, his tests show there is virtually no speed difference when using mhddfs, which is very surprising. My experience with using fuse in the past with NTFS, was that it was painfully slow. I’m sure things have matured greatly since I tried it a few years ago.
So, I found myself tweaking my Conky rc file today. I’ve been using mocp for playing music becuase it’s a really lightweight, versatile and can run detached from the console. I really wanted to see my currently playing music info on my desktop in Conky, but Conky’s documentation shows no mention of any support for moc and thier are no mention of variables to use for the config.
So, in doing some googling, I found a website that has a patch for moc support and also mentions that it’s been in Conky since September 28th! I guess they haven’t updated the documentation yet.
Here’s a list of the new variables you can use in your conkyrc file to add moc support.
- $moc_state: Current state of MOC; playing, stopped etc.
- $moc_file: File name of the current MOC song.
- $moc_title: Title of the current MOC song.
- $moc_artist: Artist of the current MOC song.
- $moc_song: The current song name being played in MOC.
- $moc_album: Album of the current MOC song.
- $moc_totaltime: Total length of the current MOC song.
- $moc_timeleft: Time left in the current MOC song
- $moc_curtime: Current time of the current MOC song.
- $moc_bitrate: Bitrate in the current MOC song.
- $moc_rate: Rate of the current MOC song.
Tags: conky, Gentoo, Linux, moc, music player
Wow! I have to have one of these chairs!
Perhaps the most amazing gaming throne you will ever see.
read more | digg story
Nice little summary of great features of the 2.6.28 kernel. I have to agree. I just installed the 2.6.28 kernel as part of my new Funtoo install a few days ago, and I haven’t run into any problems yet. I’m about to give ext4 a try. Hopefully all goes well.
[excerpt]
This Christmas Linux kernel release brings several great new features to Linux, and its improvements promise even more Linux desktop goodness in the future.[/excerpt]
read more | digg story
I can’t believe I never saw this before. Sourceforge has an absolutely HUGE list of tips and tricks. There’s hundreds of Linux tips and lots of programming tips as well.
Tags: programming, tips, tricks
This is really old news, but it’s new news to me because I just noticed this.
Daniel Robbins Funtoo site now has some articles on it that he recently created. Right now, he has posted some of the articles that we’ve previously seen on the IBM Developer Works website, but there’s also now a quide for installing Funtoo.
CPAN is great for easily installing and updating Perl modules. I use it all of the time on my servers. It’s a lot easier than managing Perl modules through the systems package manager. The problem is, when you want to install or update a Perl module, it asks you if you want to follow and install all of the dependencies and the dependencies for that… and so on. Sometimes you want to be anal and make sure it doesn’t install any extra crap, but quite often, it would be nice to just have it install what it needs automatically, so you can walk away and do other things while it’s installing.
I found this nice little blog post that shows you how to have CPAN automatically install all of the dependencies without prompting you.
Tags: cpan, Linux, tips, unattended
Today I had a need to keep the load on a server at 20 for an extended period of time. I was doing this to test notification escalations in Nagios. So, I found a nice little program call cpuburn-in that will load a processor at 100%. It’s just a tarball with an executable and a single README file included. To run the program, call the executable and supply the number of minutes you want it to run. So, to run it for 60 minutes, just use:
./cpuburn-in 60 |
Since I wanted to generate a 20 load on the server for 60 minutes, I just put this in a loop and spawned 20 processes.
i=1; while [ $i -le 20 ];do ./cpuburn-in 60 & i=$(( $i + 1 ));done |
This worked nicely for keeping the load right around 20 for me. If you want to kill things off early, just do the following:
ps a | grep cpuburn-in | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill |
Tags: Linux, load testing, tips
I’ve seen many websites that have pretty much the same ext3 performance tips, but I just came across this one today that had something very useful on it.
It turns out that the ext3 filesystem by default reserves 5% of the disk space of the volume just in case the volume fills up. This would allow the system to continue running and allow the root user to still log in and clean things up. The problem is, 5% of a 300G drive is 15G, which is pretty excessive. Like most things, this setting can be changed uisng the tune2fs program. I changed my percentage of reserved blocks to 1% instead of 5% which freed up 10G on my drive.
This was very easy to do with the following:
# tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sda1 |
So I figured what the heck, I might as well install some stats software if I ever plan on updating my blog. So, I just installed a Google Analytics plugin. Of course, I’ll have to wait a bit for it to start showing some stats.
Tags: website
