mikas blog

My targus wireless multimedia presenter seems to be broken so I needed a new device. The Logitech Cordless Presenter won the match. The Kensington Presenter is nice, but Logitech provides the best presenter stick I’ve ever seen.
Karl wrote a nice overview already so I’ll just add the notes regarding Linux.
What the device [...]

Update: just noticed that the power button is the USB part of the device. So just plug in the USB part into the presenter device will turn the device off. Tricky but nice.

The Kensington Wireless Presenter just works. The keymapping when using on Linux:

top/laserpointer: keycode 71 (being “F5″, which starts the presentation in [...]

Update on 2008-05-22: check out http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/announcing_the_sun_presenter_console – the presenter-screen extension is available for current OpenOffice 3.0 beta version now (thanks for pointer to Stefan Weigel)
Besides some other issues (not being relevant for the topic I’m blogging about) OpenOffice Impress ("the Powerpoint of the free Office suite") has one major drawback: lack of reasonable dualhead support.
At [...]

Blu-men-krug, nicht zu verwechseln mit Blue Man Group!

If you feel tempted to use a picture of two hands shaking in front of a globe, put the pencil down, step away from the desk, and think about taking a vacation or investigating aromatherapy.
— Nancy Duarte, auf Seite 94 im Buch “Presentation Zen”

“Presentation Zen. Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices [...]

Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios von David Josephsen ist ein rund 200 Seiten leichtes Buch über das Open-Source Monitoring Tool Nagios. Das Buch ist in leicht verständlichem Englisch gehalten. Ich finde die Idee von Noses, bei Rezensionen das Inhaltsverzeichnis wiederzugeben kopierenswert, daher:

Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Best Practices
CHAPTER 2 Theory of Operations
CHAPTER 3 Installing Nagios
CHAPTER 4 Configuring [...]

D’oh, forgot this blog entry in the drafts… Pretty old, but maybe useful for anyone out there anyway…. So: Since more than a year I’ve a DVB-T USB device, a Terratec Cinergy T². Of course I want to use it on my Debian-based grml system. It’s really easy to set it up:

# tail -f /var/log/syslog
Feb [...]

If you are new to Solaris one of the first things you might have to adjust is the network setup. If you are coming from the Linux-way-of-live the involved steps might be a bit uncommon for you. My description is refering to default Solaris EXCE (build 87) and OpenSolaris 2008.05 (build 86_rc3) systems. I’m describing [...]

Update on 2008-05-05: the stable release of OpenSolaris (2008.05) ships the pcn driver, updated the according section in this blog entry.

% cat /etc/release
Solaris Express Community Edition snv_87 X86
[...]

Additionally to grml-router (set up your box as NAT-router), grml-bridge (set up your box as bridge) and grml-ap (set up your box as access point) thanks to Gebi the current grml versions provide a simple script named grml-vnet. grml-vnet is a script to create persistent tun/tap devices with integrated bridge handling.
It’s a nice feature to [...]

Nearling

Linux has always been able to show how much I/O was going on
(the bi and bo columns of the vmstat 1 command).
iotop is a Python program with a top like UI used to show of behalf
of which process is the I/O going on. It requires Python ≥ 2.5 and
a Linux kernel >= 2.6.20.

— http://guichaz.free.fr/misc/#iotop
The [...]

Quoting the package description of Debian’s gitosis:

gitosis aims to make hosting git repos easier and safer.
It manages multiple repositories under one user account,
using SSH keys to identify users. End users do not need
shell accounts on the server, they will talk to one shared
account that will not let them run arbitrary commands.

I’m pretty happy with mercurial [...]

At linuxdays Graz I held my talk about "Systemadministration++". I was telling my audience mainly stuff I collected for adminzen.org. It was the first time I could use the lessig method for presentation. First time, and could? Yes, because when using the lessig method to be able to use a presenter screen a dual head [...]

Update: thanks for mentioning ethtool, Robert Fischer
A common sysadmin task is to locate a specific device and identify which driver is responsible for it. Usage examples to identify a WLAN device on Linux:
Not so well known yet – pciutils >=2.2.9. provides switch ‘-k’ for lspci:

% lspci -k
[...]
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection [...]

Wer die LKML nicht mitliest, aber am Workflow von Open-Source-Entwicklung interessiert ist, sollte unbedingt in den Thread "Slow DOWN, please!!!" hineinlesen. Ausgelöst von David ‘Mr. SPARC and Network’ S. Miller, geht es um die Frage, wie man die enorm vielen Patches und damit einhergehende Bugs/Regressionen im Merge-Window besser in den Begriff bekommen könnte.
Natürlich ist das [...]