Having a lot of local users and/or processes accessing external repositories needlessly increases access times and bandwidth usage. Use a simple script to setup a syncronisation between a CentOS mirror and a local server. Here it is

#/bin/sh

VERSIONS=(5 5.1)
REPOS=(os updates centosplus extras)
RSYNC_LOCATION=”rsync://rsync.mirrorservice.org/sites/mirror.centos.org”
DESTINATION=”/repository/distributions/CentOS”

for version in ${VERSIONS[@]}
do
for repo […]

This is short quick tutorial on how to integrate these technologies to build a successful MVC web platform. Elixir is a declarative layer built on top of SQLAlchemy, the definition of the model becomes much simpler but just as flexible whilst queries remain within the SQLAlchemy space. The difficult bit is putting these two model […]

If you don’t trust the network your on, wan’t to appear to be in another location or need to bypass forced (aka transparent) proxying of your web traffic SOCKS proxying over an SSH tunnel maybe for you!
It’s very straight forward on Windows or Linux, the one thing you do need though is some other computer […]

Often you need to create a tunnel from one system to another, this is simple enough to do. Either you want to forward a local port on your system to a remote system securely (think POP3 etc) which you can do like this on the local system:

ssh -f -N -L 110:localhost:110 ruser@remote.system.com
Then you would configure […]

Download the kernel source package for example kernel-2.6.18-8.el5.src.rpm and install it after following the instructions on creating a user specific build layout.
Then the minimum that’s required is -

cd rpm/SPECS
rpmbuild -ba –target=i686 kernel-2.6.spec
If you need to patch the kernel with your changes, place the patch in the rpm/SOURCES directory and update the spec file with the […]

Using the kernel build system to build a module when you ony have access to binary object files is not as straightforward as it may seem.
The kernel kbuild documenation does not have a complete description of this, so i had to piece it together from mailing lists. The reason for this is probably simply that doing this is discouraged because drivers should have their code released and if possible integrated into the kernel.
So, you’ve got some […]

Using raw devices in Cygwin has changed over the years and the current documentation doesn’t make it that clear what is required to use them correctly. A google search turns up some of the older methods of accessing raw devices mixed in with the new (POSIX) method which i describe below in the hope it […]

If you use Cygwin on Windows for any purpose at all you might want to consider trying out PuTTYcyg which replaces both a standard PuTTY installation (it’s actually built on top of PuTTY) and the absolutely rubbish windows cmd.exe, which i’ve lived with for far far to long.
I’ve just found it and it works like […]

I often develop using a windows platform and deploy on unix/linux. One of the great things about Python is it’s platform flexibility.
I’m learning Pylons which is an MVC framework at the moment and running through the blog tutorial which is a great starting point. Im developing using an Sqlite database (and probably deploying on a […]

When using yum in a %post section of a kickstart a number of services are unavailable that yum would normally use. I got the error message “SysLogHandler instance has no attribute ‘unixsocket’” which is because syslog is unavailable and normally listens on the /dev/log device.
To get around this is i just moved the device file […]