After the last NSA scandal I’ve found some time to read some texts about PFS and ECDSA keys lately. I always used RSA keys but wanted to give a try to ECDSA so I wanted to give it a try (test performance, etc). Here is how I’ve done it. Firstly find your favorite curve. A short tip about bit length and complexity could be found here. From it you will now that using 256 bit ECDSA key should be enough for next 10-20 years. ...

Lately I tried to remove some streams from MKV file - I wanted: video, audio in my language and no subtitles. I achieved it with mkvtoolnix utils. Firstly I have to identify streams in file: $ mkvmerge -i input_file.mkv File 'test.mkv': container: Matroska Track ID 0: video (V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC) Track ID 1: audio (A_DTS) Track ID 2: audio (A_AC3) Track ID 3: audio (A_DTS) Track ID 4: audio (A_AC3) Track ID 5: subtitles (S_TEXT/UTF8) Track ID 6: subtitles (S_TEXT/UTF8) Chapters: 16 entries You could use more verbose tool mkvinfo for that purpose too. ...

Some time ago I prepared a PC that was responsible for batch encoding of movies to formats suitable for web players (such as. Video.js  external link , JW Player  external link , Flowplayer  external link , etc.) ...

SPDY is new protocol proposed by Google as an alternative for HTTP(S). Currently Chrome and Firefox browsers are using it as default if available on server. It is faster in most cases by few to several percent. The side effect of using mod_spdy  external link is that it’s working well only with thread safe Apache’s modules. PHP module for Apache is not thread safe so we need to use PHP as CGI or FastCGI service. CGI is slow - so running mod_spdy for performance gain with CGI is simply pointless. FastCGI is better but it’s not possible to share APC  external link cache in FastCGI mode (ex. using spawn-fcgi), so it’s poor too. Best for PHP is PHP-FPM  external link which is FastCGI service with dynamic process manager and could use full advantages of APC. In such configuration I could switch from apache prefork to worker which should use less resources and be more predictable. ...

Yesterday I have problem with fglrx witch cause ugly system reset. After that, one of my drives was marked as failed in RAID5 array. Hotspare was automatically used to rebuild array. But this hotspare is the oldest and slowest drive I’ve got… After rebuild I’ve tested failed drive and it was fine - no bad block, no any other issue - so I wanted it running back in array. What I do: ...

I was configuring GlusterFS on few servers using Ansible  external link and have a need to update /etc/hosts with hostnames for easier configuration. I found this1 one working: - name: Update /etc/hosts lineinfile: dest=/etc/hosts regexp='.*{{item}}$' line='{{hostvars.{{item}}.ansible_default_ipv4.address}} {{item}}' state=present with_items: '{{groups.somegroup}}' http://xmeblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/ansible-dynamicaly-update-etchosts.html  external link  ↩︎

Learn how to reset a user password in your own Ghost Blog by accessing the SQLite database and updating the password hash.

Learn about inodes exhaustion on XFS, how to check inode limits, and how to adjust the inode percentage to prevent issues on your Linux filesystem.

I’ve bought a NAS and customized it a little. But there was one thing which make my nights sleepless. NAS was seeking disks every 5~10 seconds - these was really irritating - especially when it was silent in room. I found that part of firmware was indexing or logging something so I wanted it dead! kill -9 was unsuccessful - process restarted after a while…. wrrr… I googled a little and found another signal I could use SIGSTOP, which will freeze process until I send SIGCONT to it - that was exactly what I need (because I normally use NFS/Samba and don’t need nothing more running on this device). ...

I’ve just bought new toy - Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 Cloud Edition. I have to play with few options before I could start using it. First thing - Firmware upgrade. Firmware upgrade I’ve started searching for latest firmware for ix2-200 Cloud and found that I have to register on Lenovo site to get firmware… I don’t like such sites where they force me to give all private data, but after few clicks on “Recommended articles” on that site I landed here: https://lenovo-eu-en.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/26790  external link So it looks that I don’t need to register - point for me. ...