Fedora 8 test-drive
Last WeekEnd, I was on a [computing] trip and borrowed a laptop from ${workplace} for the ocasion. Since I used it for a personal purpose, I chose to drop anything it has on the hard disk and start with a fresh install. I don't really have particular criterias, but as a FreeBSD user, I am used to have recent software, and am particulary disapointed by the obsolescence of certain Linux distros. Since I was not going to have enouth time to compile, I wanted a binary packages based Linux distribution.
Efficient strlen(3) implementation in C (part 2)
Some times ago, I wrote [1] a few words about strlen(3) implementation and how inefficient it is on most systems. Although optimizing this function is utterly not the best way to make your program run faster (refer to Reducing complexity
in the previous strlen(3) post), it is interesting to digg deeper in how modern CPUs can help us to compute a string length faster.
Setting up QEMU for networking under FreeBSD
QEMU is a wonderful tool for kernel development. The default configuration emulates a sort of virtual network with a dhcp server and everything, and even the possibility to talk to the outside as from behind a firewall... all this without root privileges.
Learning GEOM: Tasting
I have been quite busy these last days and didn't got as much time as expected to have fun with geom(4) — the FreeBSD modular disk transformation framework. Since documentation is quite sparse compared to the rocket science inside GEOM, I spend a lot of time in man pages and reading existing GEOM classes source code... However, as recently said on the freebsd-geom mailing list…
Efficient strlen(3) implementation in C
Yesterday, somebody reached my website googling for efficient strlen implementation
. This remind me an old discussion on code optimisation and how it was possible to dramatically reduce execution time of some basic functions.
Dumping LVM2 logical volumes under FreeBSD
At work, I generally use the Debian GNU/Linux operating system: as all our servers run Debian, it avoids loads of clashes when we put in production our work. But I am frequently complaining about how Debian works and globally can't bear it's frustrating package management system (which becomes even worth than ever when you run a advanced-user / developer / desktop machine
). Anyway, there are many situations I could do my job with another operating system that fits much more my needs, let's say FreeBSD... The problem is that as a paranoid sysadmin, my current /home directory is a LVM2 logical volume on top of software RAID controlled by mdadm.
System Administrator Appreciation Day
Today is a special day! It's System Administrator Appreciation Day! Do not forget your favourite systems administrator :).
Efficient tests with optional diagnostic in C
I love C because it is a low level high level programming language.
I hate C for exactly the same reason.
If you have already wrote a C program that rely on a lot of system calls and tests to check the execution environment before doing something, you have probably entered the hell of verifying loads of return values and displaying diagnostic messages for each failure case.
Incremental backup from shell scripts
In the past days, I have been working on an incremental backup solution for my company dedicated servers. These servers hosts gigabytes of data spread between websites, documents repositories and tools.
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