This is an update of the post from 2013-09-13

One of the uses of a TPM is to feed /dev/random on your linux box. I will not go into the political implications of TPM.

See also Matt Domsch’s blog.

Those still running RHEL5/CentOS5, be sure to have rng-utils-2.0-4 or later and kernel-2.6.18-238.el5 or later.

Some of the following steps are specific to my HP ProLiant MicroServer, but most will apply to any modern linux and HW (one would prefer the TPM to be an integral part of the motherboard as opposed to a module).

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.

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.