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.

for paid accounts (DynDNS Pro and Dyn Standard DNS), one can do the updates with TSIG.

This allows us to not use ddclient, thus not having our DynDNS.com password in a config file on disk. Obviously, if the key is leaked, an attacker can still wreak havoc with your DynDNS zone configurations, but at least they will not be able to log onto the web interface of DynDNS under your name.

In the olden days, one would have to manually calculate[1] to get a file system (FS), in a logical volume (LV) that was part of a volume group (VG) living on a software RAID, properly aligned. I would get this calculation wrong in about 10% of the cases.

These days, modern Linux distributions like Fedora 14 and RHEL 6 parse hints from the storage.