I recently talked about using ZFS on a home server. In my case, that’s a HP N36L Microserver equipped with four 1.5TB Harddisks combined as a RAID-Z sitting in the drive bays and an additional 60GB SSD packed in the 5.25” slot as boot device. Of course, you can use the internal USB slot sitting on the mainboard itself to boot up the system, but I wanted to use the SSD as Cache as well.
keeping your dotfiles in git
If you’re commonly working in different environments, you sure want to keep your dotfiles (like .zshrc, .vimrc and so on) in sync. Of course you can use rsync or unison for that, but let’s face it, it’s not that easy: in most cases, you can’t be sure that every system is loaded with the same versions of your tools and some configuration parameters may break your workflow if they are not supported by the installed release. In addition, you may want to have different settings (like http_proxy) in your environment, depending on where you’re working.
The goal of this article is to share my way of keeping my dotfiles in sync. Please, think about it before blindly adapting - it may not work for you!
PXE with a FritzBox (without modifications!)
Deploying a new system with removable media like thumb drives or CDs is a pain, even without the initial boot floppies like in the old days. Booting from the network is pretty much straight forward, and having a rescue system like GRML on hand can be a blessing. But in most home networks, the infrastructure is based on a FritzBox to combine DSL/cable, DECT and other neat’ish things. These Boxes are not able to provide boot information from the integrated DHCP server without flashing a firmware-mod like Freetz. This will not only vanish your warranty, you could say good bye to some of the features as well.
Happy days: there is a workaround. ;-)
Hi there!
Welcome to my new blog.
For the last couple of years, I used to write articles at blogs.interdose.com but after I left Interdose and sold my share, I decided to move my blog to a more generic domain. But not only the URL is different, I also migrated from Wordpress to Octopress. And from now on, I’ll blog in english to reach a wider audience. My english is not perfect, but I’m eager to improve. :-)