Keep Your Data Safe: Cloud RAIDs
You have probably heard the story: someone has all their data stored in the Cloud, and one morning it’s all gone. Maybe Google disabled your email account and won’t you let back in. Or maybe it’s Dropbox that dropped your files. Or maybe it’s (and this is a real case) box.com that handed somebody’s account to someone else, who promptly cleaned the account and deleted all the other person’s files. Continue readingHOWTO: Figure Out What File Is Missing, and Where
One of the really maddening things about Linux (and UNIX in general) is that files are stored in random places. That is, they are not really random, but each application has its own idea of where it wants to look for stuff. You, as a user, have an inkling of what’s missing (maybe because of an error message, or because you researched on a search site). But you have not the foggiest idea of where you should look for it. Continue readingSecuring Dropbox Content with EncFS
I read an article this morning about encryption on Cloud Storage Services. The idea was that the latest NSA spying scandals revealed how much the government can access, and the assumption is that a lot of the thing you store are sensitive enough that you wouldn’t want the government to have random access. The article then went on and introduced a series of software/service combinations that perform a sync and add encryption to your files. Continue readingFixing AWSTATS
On this server (and on most others I administer) I use awstats for statistics. It’s a really nice package that give a pretty decent granularity of the visitors. It’s been working wonderfully for years, and once you get it configured, it is reliable. Until recently. I installed awstats 7.1, and it worked fine, but suddenly it stopped. Just like that. Adding any key-value configuration option would completely corrupt the output, and all output was gone for searches, bots, etc. Continue reading