I really, really enjoyed this lecture. This is a recorded talk from Google IO by Chris DiBona (Open Source Programs Manager for Google) While nothing ground breaking is presented — it’s more of an overview talk — the perspective of open source, where open source has come from and where it is going is all interesting.

Chris also touches on the next generation of open source developers or the lack there of. This is why Google introduced Google Summer of Code. Something I wish I could have participated in but I wasn’t a student when they came up with that. Nevertheless, it’s a great program.

Anyway, I encourage you to watch or listen to it.

Anyway, for the time being I decided that the easiest thing for me to do is to write my own little (python) program to handle the backup and automatic retrieval of said backup archives. I don’t push or pull a lot of data between the computers, so pulling full archives though the network (as opposed to the changed bits that rsync or unison would do) doesn’t matter so much to me. The most important part is that the backup is current.

The programs are by no means complicated or unique; in fact, they might be the simplest backup programs ever. I’ve posted the source code at BitBucket.org and can be viewed at: http://bitbucket.org/frankv01/vpsbackup

If you either end up using it or deriving a new backup solution from it, please drop me a line. I’d love to know that.

* You might wonder why someone who writes-on (lives and breaths) open source would use windows…  The of matter of fact is my professional work (as of this writing, at least) is done on Windows — SQL Server and the .Net to be specific. I’ve never said anything bad about Microsoft nor will I. I believe that Open Source and traditional closed-source has their place. A software developer  can run their coded bases as desired. I, for one, prefer open source to closed-source — paid or otherwise.

Part of the problem, ironically, is that it is easy to do but done in an unexpected way. Basically, you accomplish it via the passwd file.

Simply execute the following (on the console, as this is a server and I wouldn’t expect it to have a GUI).

I originally pulled this information from: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/get-a-list-of-linux-users-179102/

Note: I didn’t definitively explore all of the possible ways one could accomplish this. Once I found this method that effectively gave me the information I was after, I quit looking. If you have additional methods, please post a comment below and I will work it in to the article citing you (and linking to your site) as the source. I would truly appreciate any and all additional methods — even if specific to a distribution.

Obviously, man is a great reference but that is actually difficult to use when getting started as it itself is a command line program. I was searching for a command to list all of the users on a system (I found it and will post a brief article on that soon) and I stumbled across this, so I wanted to share it (as well as retain it for future reference.)

http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/admin.shtml

This covers such things as:

• Networking information / status (arp, ifconfig, netstat, etc)
• File system information (df)
• Disk Size / utilization information (du)
• How to search for files with find
• Easy-to-use console text editors (nano, joe)
• Process management / information (ps, top)

In addition to listing the commands, it lists common usage scenarios and command line flags of note.

WordPress's Add Post page Collapsible / Expandable box where the error existed.

Once I disabled the plug in, the expand / collapse worked as it should.

I’m not trying to punish or shame the Simple Tags team and I’m not sure the error is universal — it may work fine on your site. I’m simply sharing to help others  as it took me some time to isolate the issue. It could have been a combination of plug ins too.

Update: I’ve found that the simple tags plug in is continuing to work properly on my other (more personal) blog http://villasenor.ws/ so the problem was obviously some combination of plug-ins on this site and not simple tags alone.

Given my recent server move, I’ve been reconfiguring certain things. In fact, I have control that I have never had before, and truthfully I’ve learned things I’ve previously masked myself from. Despite possible difficulties and risks, I shouldn’t have done that to myself; I’d recommend to anyone to take responsibility of setting up their own server. It’s wroth while learning.

That said, I ran in to a small issue where the entire site wasn’t always rendering. While I’ve never completely isolated the problem, I did recall coming across the following on ServerFault:

When Apache and MySQL are installed their default configs assume they are working with more RAM available to them which can cause problems.

Along with that, the author posted starting guidelines which one can use to tweak their own install. While I’m not a Sys-Admin expert, I suspect this would be a good starting guideline. I don’t want to republish other peoples work, and hence the links are below:

• Answer by tasaro, question: How much VPS ram would I need to run WordPress, Apache, SVN & MySQL?
• Diagnosing and Fixing Memory Issues at Linode’s Library

One thing of note is that the URL changed from simply http://theopensourceu.com to http://blog.theopensourceu.com/ but they will both continue to work for the time being. However, blog.TheOpenSourceU.com is the preferred URL.

Currently, 90% of the visitors to this site are reported as “new” users.  So a majority of the users affected will not have seen this notice.

Despite the limited (percentage-wise) repeat audience, I thought it’d be worth while to post this.

In any event, my sincere thank you for reading this site or simply a post.

The Open Source U | Promote Your Page Too

http://code.google.com/p/synergy-plus/