Natural Born Coder

Category: Linux

  • Understanding VLANs

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    doozer
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    The aim of this article is to explain VLANs to someone who has a reasonable understand of how a computer network works. Recently I’ve been reading up on OpenStack as I’d like to put together a small personal cloud for a project I’m working on. So far so easy but the one aspect that I’ve been…

  • WobblyStack – Reading List

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    doozer
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    I had to read a lot before I could get to the point where I felt I could write a script that installed OpenStack for me. The links below are a selection of articles that I found useful. This is the complete list of things I read as I didn’t start compiling the list before…

  • A Quick Introduction to Open vSwitch

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    doozer
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    In a previous article I discussed bridges and showed how the Linux utilities bridge-utils and iproute2 could be used to create virtual bridges within a system. This is great for simple set up but when deploying a cloud environment a bit more functionality is required and that’s where Open vSwitch comes in.

  • Installing VirtualBox Additons on Ubuntu Server

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    doozer
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    I have a number of Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machines installed under VirtualBox running on Windows 8.1 and occasionally I find it useful to have the VirtualBox additions installed. Unfortunately for me the documented process doesn’t seem to work. Whenever I mount the ISO image using Devices –> Insert Guest Additions CD Image… I find that…

  • Udacity Computer Networking Course Notes

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    doozer
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    I’ve just started the Udacity course on Computer Networking and I’ve hit a few bumps along the way so I thought I’d document them here for others to find.

  • Mininet Waiting for Network Configuration

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    doozer
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    I recently started taking the Udacity course on Computer Networking and while it looks like a good course it suffers from the same problem all the Udacity courses seem to suffer from: really badly put together examples and quizzes. It’s a shame because the material itself is generally of a really high quality. The problem I…

  • Using PuTTY for Key-Based SSH Login

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    doozer
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    If you are on Windows and need to “shell” into a Linux machine then PuTTY is the tool of choice. For password based logins it’s as simple as entering the IP address or name of the machine you want to connect to but for key based logins things get a little more complicated. This guide…

  • WobblyStack – A Single Node OpenStack Install

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    doozer
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    For a couple of years now I’ve run a small VMWare virtualization system for my business. Broadly speaking it’s gone well and been fairly uneventful. The only panic came when I transitioned from the free to the small business version of the software – I installed more memory than was allowed in the free version,…

  • VirtualBox Additions on the Cloudera Training Machine

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    doozer
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    I was playing with the Cloudera training virtual machine (as supplied by the Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce course over on Coursera) today and I installed it into VirtualBox as suggested by the instructor notes. I must have hit every pot-hole on the way through though so I thought I’d document them here for anyone else…

  • Only detected a i686

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    doozer
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    One of the servers I manage is currently running Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) but in a little over a month 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) will be making an appearance. Now there’s no good reason for me to be rushing out an upgrading but it’s got to be done at some point so I thought I’d get…

  • Installing mod_pagespeed on Ubuntu

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    doozer
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    The mod_pagespeed extension is designed to reduce the load time of pages on a web site by performing certain optimizations such as  optimizing images and minifying CSS and JavaScript. This guide covers installing mod_pagespeed on an Apache server running under Ubuntu 12.04. The process should be the same for later versions of Ubuntu as well.

  • Improving Joomla Performance

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    doozer
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    I recently tested this site using this online website performance tool: Web Page Test and I thought I’d share some of the results and what I did to improve them. You can also try YSlow however this will generally give you a result that is across a LAN rather than a DSL type connection and I’ve noticed it…