In February 2013, I got a new work laptop. It’s a Lenovo ThinkPad x230.

These are my installation notes.

this machine is now using a StartCom SSL certificate.

sorry about this taking so long. As of now blog.pcfe.net uses a CAcert signed certificate.

To have chromium (and chrome) browser do Kerberos TGT for example.com web pages, one needs to pass --auth-server-whitelist="*.example.com"

changing providers I adjusted the old script to fit my router, using PPPoE but not NetworkManager.

Create /etc/ppp/ip-up.local with this content

SMS reception while online

Wanting to be able to use gnokii while I have a connection open with ModemManager, I created the following udev rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/98-pcfe-modem.rules

This is what I use to mess about my laptop’s power settings.

In Fedora 16 (and I presume other distributions using gnome3), each print job generates a notification. If one prints a lot, this ends up cluttering the notification bar.

For the last decade, I have been using cvs at home to have version control over documents (mostly LaTeX and config files). The original cvs server has been since migrated to a virtual machine.

While the current Smart-UPS (aka SMT) range of UPS from APC has much fewer variables exposed in a way that is useful for fancy apcupsd usage (you’ll find apcupsd in EPEL), they are still amply sufficient for home use. Basically, the UPS gives an estimated time left at current load and the remaining battery level. At home these are anyway the only two readings I want to trigger scripts on.

The must read Secure dynamic DNS howto has all the steps you need to set up DDNS updates with BIND.

What follows are some very terse notes for RHEL5, highlighting steps not directly obvious from that howto.

sometimes I need a quick and dirty speed test of an internet connection. Speedtest.net Mini allows just that, but I did not want random surfers to eat my bandwith. So here’s how to set up your own.