rip-loop.sh: Ripping a few hundred CDs in a day

Last year after moving to a new house, I decided to finally set up some local backup functionality and found a Synology RS819 for a good price, added some drives to it, and started playing around with it. From there, I decided to finally start ripping all the CDs that I had collected over the years that were taking up space in my office (where they still stand, only because I've conveniently forgotten to move them out to storage...

ntpd, openntpd, and ubuntu

ntpd (from ntp.org) has recently gotten a bad rap. A series of vulnerabilities have been found in it that, from my perspective, make it no longer safe to run on production, publicly facing machines; however, there is an alternative: openntpd.

Love, Hate, Linux

I have much of a love / hate relationship with Linux. From a philosophical standpoint, I love the idea of a free, open operating system that I can modify as I see fit.

How CVE-2014-0160 let us show the power of puppet

CVE-2014-0160 which recently made headlines because of it's massive impact across the large majority of Internet-based services has allowed us to show that the return on investment with puppet is greater than 0. Here's how.

Finding deleted files that are still opened by a process

Recently my server ran out of space, but my checks (via du) reported that only about 60GB was actually being used. That's because if a process has a file open that is then deleted, the space is still claimed, but the file doesn't appear.

Dirty reads with software raid?

Is it possible software raid 1 to not actually record data writes until some time later? I know it's possible with hardware raid, but I've never heard of that with software raid.

Restoring a lost file from your cache in Chrome

Recently, I switched the software that generates this blog from a custom Perl script that I built to a Jekyll based system. The migration itself went fairly well.