rhau.se

Recently i made “the switch”! Not in the way you might imagine though. Ever since 2003 i have been a passionate mac user. I still use macs at home and work and am still passionate about them.

Before 2003 i was playing a lot of games. Linux was and is something that i have been working/playing around with since 1996. To make a long story short: I wanted to use Linux and also play games (read dual boot linux/windows). The price tags on new macs ware also something that got me thinking about building a new shiny i7 based PC.

I am now back on a PC with Ubuntu Linux 9.04 and Windows 7. So far so god. One thing that i enjoy with Linux is that i am able to customize it to my needs. With Linux now being my primary OS (by choice) i had to fix some kind of backup for photos and all that other stuff on my PC that i would not like to loose in case of an accident. The first thing that came to my mind was rsync.

I used rsync to mirror my files on to an usb-disk. But after a few days i started to miss Time Machine which i was using when i had a Mac as my primary computer at home. Just mirroring files was not enough to give me that warm and cozy feeling. I needed to go back in time! Read more…

If you, like so many other people these days, switch to Linux you will come in contact with something called unux scripts, shell scripts or bash scripts. These scripts are text-files that execute commands just like bat-files in Windows. I prefer shell-scripts because i think they are more powerful then bat-files but that is just my opinion.

Some things you should know:
#!/bin/bash usually is the first line in a bash script. It is called shebang (also called a hashbang, hashpling, or pound bang) and specifies in which shell to execute the code that follows below.

Everything after a # is a comment and does not get executed.

Below you will find examples of a few things that you can do with shell scripts on Linux and other Unixes. If you have questions: have a look at the man page of the command or post a comment and I will try to explain. Read more…

Easter has come and gone. It was a beautiful weekend here in Sweden, about 17 Celsius in the shade and very sunny. What better to do then to start the charcoal grilling season? Since my friends regard me as a bit of a geek (which I am) I had to purchase some new equipment for the season. Read more…

Recently I discovered that the old theme of this blog was a bit to popular for my taste. So I switched. I hope you like the new look.

My thanks go out to mg12 who created the theme I am using now. I like it.

Since Isabella was borne I have had a lot of things to do. Therefore I felt that there was just not enough time to maintain my server at home. There was also the bandwidth issue. At the moment the fastest internet access I can get at home has only a 1 Mbit/s up-link. A bit to slow in my opinion. Therefore I started searching for a good web hosting company that could host rhau.se

After a long period of reading and asking friends i found anx.se. A small web-hosting company with good service and low prices. I spoke to their support staff a couple of times before i signed up with them. The support staff could answer all of my questions so I guess that they are quite competent

I have only been a customer of anx.se for a couple of days but so far everything is going according to my expectations (they ware quite high). Anx.se has c-panel which lets you configure your mail server, spamassassin your web server and so on. It works well and is easy to learn.

If you are looking for a good and affordable web-hosting company I can recommend anx.se.

Enjoy the bandwidth
/thorsten

This article should also apply on the newly released 1000HE and maybe the 900 series of EEE Computers. If you can verify that this is the case please let me know.

A few days ago I got myself the Eee Pc 1000H from Asus. My first impression about the hardware is that the build quality surpasses my expectations. After a day or two of typing on the 1000H-keyboard I have gotten very used to it and type as fast as on a normal sized keyboard. The screen is great to.

Since memory nowadays is so cheap I purchased a 2 GB SO-DIMM DDR2 module from Corsair. Product number is VS2GSDS667D2. The memory from Corsair works without any problems. I guess that it is not necessary to have 2 gigabytes of memory to run Ubuntu but a large file cache will speed things up.

On to the installation of Ubuntu 9.04: Read more…

I have been working with firewalls and security for quite many years at this point. Therefore friends and people I know ask me every now and then to write a firewall script for them. So instead of basically writing the same script over and over again I decided to write this article that explains how you can set up a basic iptables box by yourself. Read more…

During the last couple of weeks i have been seeing a lot of messages about denied cache queries on my DNS servers.

month day time server name named[6518]: client ip number#port number: query (cache) ‘./NS/IN’ denied

At first they looked quite innocent and I thought nothing much of them. But after a while the number of logged events grew faster and faster so it was time to do some investigation on google. After reading a few articles I came to the conclusion that my logs where trying to tell me that my DNS server where used as DNS DDoS deflectors. Read more…

I, like so many of my fellow Macintosh users want to keep my OS X installation well maintained. So i sat down and read a few man pages describing those nifty cli utilities that are included in OS X. Since OS X is a UNIX style operating system I decided to create a small shell script to perform the following maintenance tasks for me .

Repair Filesystem Permissions
Verify Disks
Run Periodic (cron) jobs
Update Prebindings
Verify Preference Files
Displa Cache size
Clear Cache

If you find the script interesting and want to use it on your mac you need to perform a few simple steps: Read more…

Well, i finally decided to ditch iWeb, vi, notepad, Dream Weaver and all the other programs i have used in the past to edit my personal homepages.

To get a fresh start i got myself a shiny new domain. I am a newbie at anything that has to do with web logs so bare with me while i get this blog more functional and add more and more content over time.

/thorsten