Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl). Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases.

While I was trying to copy a load of files from one server to another I found a problem I’ve seen time and time again, rsync with filenames that have spaces in them. While normally this can be easily fixed via number of methods: rsync ‘jon@example.com:/remote/path/filename with spaces.txt’ /local/path/ Notice the quotes around the remote path, you can also use the -s (or –protect-args) which will send the command as-is to the remote.

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night. The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though. The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early.

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.

Here’s my two pence worth in the argument against government driven “adult” filtering on the internet I’ve sent a copy to the consultation team via the open rights group and also to my local MP. I am raising my concerns about the proposal for network filtering of adult content and default blocking. I believe that filtering should be an opt in feature offered by ISP’s, this feature should have a vetting process and be request driven using open standards and lists viewable by the userbase.

So I’m forever raving about how good Linux is to the guys at work, it seems that over the last 18 months or so my rants have been getting louder/stronger. Well it seems that its starting to work. I’ve been showing off my shiny Gnome3 desktop to them over the last year or so, and although impressed it still wasn’t Windows 7, or more importantly was no good for playing games.

So I was working on a script a while ago to backup all my email on my Linux box. I put together a fairly simple bash script to delve into home directories and pick out the Maildir and back it up. Great! DRIVE="/dev/sdb1" HOME="/home/" LIST="/tmp/backlist_$$.txt" # mount $DRIVE /backup set $(date) for DIR in `find /home/ -name “Maildir” -print`; do NAME=`echo $DIR|awk -F\/ {’ print $3 ‘}` tar vcfz “/backup/Mail/mail_full_${NAME}_$6-$2-$3.tgz” $DIR umount /backup

What are my current favourite podcasts? Mysterious Universe - Brilliant podcast covering pretty much every aspect of the paranormal, but not overly serious and no signs of any tin foil hats! Linux Outlaws - Superbly fun podcast, covering the latest news in the Linux, Open source and free software world with the (more than) occasional rant from Fab. Ubuntu UK Podcast - Another easy going Linux (Ubuntu centric) podcast, good bunch of presenters, covers the latest news in the Ubuntu world.