Gentoo: Easy way to ditch your ISP nameserver

My linode is now my personal DNS resolver. I have officially ditched the ISP nameservers from this point forward now that I found unbound. Unbound is a lightweight, recursive resolver that is perfect for your LAN, co-located host, or even a single host. For your single host, emerge unbound, start the service, add 127.0.0.1 to the first nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf. Unbound is setup (by default) to accept connections from localhost and refuse anything else.

Using fuelly.com to track gasoline usage (2009 stats)

In June 2009, I started tracking my gasoline usage in my car via [fuelly.com][1]. There is no specific reason that I started doing this, just for fun I guess. I kind of like tracking how much I spend on such things in a neat graphical format. So, 2009 stats (since June): 26 fuel-ups, 8,130 miles, $631.50. You can find my current stats here by clicking on the image below. [1]:

DLNA support for the Samsung LNxxB630 TV

DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is a standard to allow entertainment devices within the home to share their content with each other across a home network. In other words, stream content from my computer to the TV across the LAN. The cool part about this, is that my TV, the LN40B630, can play HD content native, meaning that the computer’s only function is to stream (not process the content, meaning my low power computer can ‘power’ the HD content).

About PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS and lighttpd

If you are running PHP on a limited-resource box, like a [VPS][1] then you may have seen your PHP pages randomly hang. I was able to trace this issue down because the PHP pages were hung up and the normal html pages were still being served. The problem was ‘solved’ when I restarted the web server. Some research later, and talking to Thilo (bangert), I found out about PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS. This is an environment variable that PHP respects, it basically tells how many requests to serve before respawning fcgi.

Gentoo: devtmpfs and boot times (revisited)

There was alot of of talk/flames on the LKML about devtmpfs. Looks like a big push for this was for embedded devices, android, etc. Since I read that it may give a boot time speed up, I was slightly intrigued. http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/4/30/182, yes…it is an old topic but it finally was released in stable .32 kernel. So, bootcharts: bootchart-2.6.31.6.png 39 seconds bootchart-2.6.32-no-devtmpfs.png 37 seconds bootchart-2.6.32-devtmpfs.png 37 seconds bootchart-2.6.32-openrc.png 26 seconds (devtmpfs) So, where is the real win here?