This weekend, Rob and I had been testing the use of hardware keys to secure ssh sessions, especially for back-end console access and certain administrative functions. Since the hardware keys are a special case, and cannot be added to the ssh-agent, we were slinging around a fair number of command …

OK, now that I have your attention with the catchy title, let me get right into the reason behind this post. Rob has been doing a lot of work lately on a set of roles to provision raspberry pi systems. I'm grateful for the work in this area, because frankly …

At ClueTrust, we use a lot of automation to run our systems. It's mostly how just a couple of us can manage hundreds of virtual servers and keep them up-to-date and operational. A few years back, I moved from using Puppet to Ansible, mostly at the suggestion of RS, who …

Over the past few weeks, RS and I have noticed an increasing number of unexplained failures logging in over SSH with both manual and automated means. On most of the servers it was just an inconvenience, but as it started to become more frequent, it became a significant issue for …

At the beginning of the month, I wrote about the move to convert Gaige's Pages to a static generation model. Today I'm following up with some performance graphs. There's absolutely nothing surprising here, but it's good to see nonetheless that things work as they should. Look to the right of …

Over Thanksgiving, one of the two drives in my "Big Disk" RAID (it was a mirror of 2 2TB drives that I used to store large things that aren't worth having on the SSD on my Mac Pro). Generally speaking, my response to failures with SMART (especially with cheap spinning …

I'd never heard of World Backup Day before seeing an article about it in Wired today, but it sounds like a good idea, especially for those whose friends may partake in a little bit of the April Foolery tomorrow. So, it's a good time for me to discuss backup software …

Hi folks. We're back on the air with a new server and a new design. Hopefully this less noisy design is a bit more palatable. Any links to the old site will cease to function today, but there weren't many anyway (according to Google Webmaster Tools), but we have preserved …