Author: kevin

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Enabling SMART monitoring for your harddrives

Install: sudo apt-get install smartmontools

List SMART status, whether enabled:
sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda (change drive device here)

Run test for a drive:
smartctl -t long /dev/sda

You can view a drive’s test statistics by typing:
smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda

To display detailed SMART information for an IDE drive, type:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/hda

To display detailed SMART information for a SATA drive, type:
sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sda

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Securing a directory on Apache with Digest Authentication

<Directory>
       Options FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride None
       #authentification
       AuthType Digest
       AuthName "munin"
       AuthDigestFile /var/www/munin/.htpasswd
       #people using apache 2.2 will use instead:
       #AuthUserFile  /var/www/munin/.htpasswd
       require valid-user
</Directory>

sudo htdigest -c /var/www/dirname/.htpasswd realmname username

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Technology refresh for my BBWeblog open source project

They say most Open Source projects are born from a need for something that doesn’t exist yet or because the alternatives that already exist don’t do exactly what you want. Sometime around 2002/2003 I started building a bulletin-board/blog/notetaking app which I called BBWeblog, the source for the project which I host on SourceForge here. If you’re reading this article, this is stored in BBWeblog. (KH update 03/03/12: this content is now actually imported into WordPress).

I’ve been running this app on JBoss since 2002/2003 on my own Linux server, and have migrated through several Linux installations and a few different versions on JBoss too. The amazing thing is the app has been incredibly stable running on JBoss & Linux, and the server runs for months without a reboot. The only times it’s been rebooted have been after a power cut or to add/change hardware in the server.

As an app I’ve found it incredibly useful but there’s a few features that would improve it’s usefulness, mainly around how the data/articles are organized and how they can be shared – I’m thinking features like tagging and links to share articles to social sites.

I could add on to what I already have, but I’ve decided it’s time to take a fresh look at rebuilding the app, and at the same time use this as an opportunity to try out some new tools and libraries. The current app is built with Struts 1.x. I’d like to take a look at the annotation support in Spring MVC in 3.x, so I think this is going to be my project for the next few weeks…

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