Author Archives: salubrium

Open Source PDF Editor for Linux (and a windows one but not OSS)

# Update – I discovered a better PDF Editor than flpsed and have written about it here I spend so much time typing and so little time writing these days, that when I have to use a pen, any length of writing ends up becoming a bit painful, especially so because I am left-handed and …

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VMware’s licensing practices following Microsoft’s lead?

Today, I tried to organise some VMware licenses for a customer who was running the ESX Starter Pack. Both my customer and myself were never aware that To upgrade from ESX 3.0 Starter to Standard or Enterprise, you have to be an ‘Enterprise Partner’ To become an Enterprise partner, you need to pay US$1000 and …

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Beyond the Linux OS – Nexenta, ReactOS, Syllable & Haiku

I recently stumbled upon this very interesting interview with (ex) Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas. The article is definitely worth a read as Con expresses much of his frustrations with the performance of the Linux kernel for desktop users (much of it relating to scheduling) as well as some of his frustrations with the kernel …

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Convert IIS ssl certificate to use in Apache

Last time I did this, I found the instructions pretty easily on how to migrate SSL’s from IIS to Apache. This time I found it hard to locate the documentation, so for my own lack of memory and when google fails you, here it is: First we need to export the certificate from IIS into …

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Troubleshooting Apache with mod_status, strace, apachetop, iftop & top

Ok – some real-life critical experience today.. one of our web servers notifies us (thanks to csf / lfd firewall ) that the server has had a high load for greater than 5 minutes. I get logged in and see the 5,10 & 15 minute load average exceeding 30 and this server normally runs at …

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Open Source Flashcard Learning with Granule or Jmemorize

Whether you are trying to study for your RHCE, MCSE, Solaris, Linux+  or some University exams or maybe even trying to learn a new language, having some flashcards can be extremely helpful – for both short-term and long-term learning. I have a pretty good system setup: cross-platform, remote learning. I have played with both Jmemorize …

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What Windows Needs – Synaptic (or any other package manager)

The weekend saw me doing a Motherboard / CPU / HDD upgrade on one of our household’s PC’s – It’s a Windows 2003 server that had an IDE drive in it and the new Mobo was SATA. The day before, the system wouldn’t boot – some cool bad sector business had caused it. So, I …

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Troubleshooting tools: ping, pathping, httping and nmap

Too many times I have heard people determine that a host is not up because they can’t ping it. Most of us (myself included) run for ping and traceroute whenever we have an issue with connectivity – but ping and traceroute rely on icmp being permitted on the routers or hosts that you are traversing …

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