PBRs blogspot: a lifetime of learning about GNU/linux.

Greetings fellow Linux hackers! I ran into a rather hard-to-diagnose issue the other day, so I am sharing the details here to help anyone el...

i make the internet work. you're welcome I look back upon the nearly half-decade I spent with Rackspace, training and coachin...

Looks like God went a little overboard with a white paintbrush this morning.

Whazzup! It's been, well, FOREVER since I posted here on pbrs.blogspot.com Last year,  after nearly 2 decades in operation, I ...

BitKeeper v bk-7.2ce is now open source - that's the community edition of BitKeeper source code product. This is a significant move; the...

How can I not humblebrag a little about this? On Quora.com my stats page shows I've topped 2m views on the various answers I've wr...

For fun, I coded this up a while ago - both to review the details of implementing a counting sort (which is super-fast, since it does no com...

It's an arbitrary number, 100.   Ten tens.  Only pertinent to us humans due to the count of digits we have on our hands and on our toe...

Sensibly, Arch includes vim.  At least it's not forcing us to use 'nano'. However, package installs were problematic. # pacm...

Debian's a reasonable distro.   apt-get installed python, gcc, make, and vim quite handily. I was a little disappointed to find it do...

What do they have against Vim?   Vim is the default Linux/UNIX editor.  Excluding it on a distro is bordering on criminal. emerge sys-ap...

For anyone who is already familiar with RedHat/Centos, this is a painless distro to adopt - you'll find few if any surprises. As with...

Yet more documentation of my  Exploring Variants of Linux  in the Rackspace Cloud OpenSUSE package management is via Yast.  Yast wants to ...

As I promised in  Exploring Variants of Linux  I'm following up with my impressions of, and notes on, various Linux distros.  This is th...

Rackspace Cloud Linux One of the very cool aspects of the Rackspace Cloud is the number of Linux/GNU variants.  As I'm already very i...

Linux 3.11 rc2  Here's an interesting snippet from Linus's announcement post regarding Linux 3.11 rc2: (a) the O_TMPFILE f...

Production.   It's a term many people have heard of, but what does it mean?   A lot of people have been asking me about this lately, s...

NOSQL is a term that strikes fear in the heart of many with traditional relational database skills. How can a database not use SQL?  How ...

I consider my cloud servers to be one big array of servers. I decided to use "fog" - the Ruby API for the Rackspace Cloud - to b...

I had the opportunity today to help someone who had done an outstanding job of migrating a website into the cloud - but their new sites perf...

Servers need backups.  And, sometimes, there are nightly maintenance scripts that need to be run, for example dumping out all transactions, ...

A compromised email account is one where spammers have determined someone's email password, and they're using the email account to s...

Customers often ask how to find out what PHP code is being called.  Sometimes, they're looking to find abusers of PHP email forms - and ...

I used to think the same way.  I've been programming UNIX/Linux for around 30 years.  I liked writing code.  I wanted my job to be writi...

Vim improves on vi in countless ways.  As a curious vi expert, I wanted to know exactly what those were, so I dove into the source code.  In...

When a logfile is of reasonable size, you can review it using "view" - a read-only version of "vim".   This gives you fl...