Using multiple nice interface dashboards to get an overview of your services is a great thing. But navigating to them all separately could sometimes be rather pain full.

Therefore I looked for some central place to give a broad overview of all of them. During last year many passed through during my search on the internet. The 2 most interesting ones where team dashboard and dashing.

Team dashboard is a promising one which could gather extremely specific data and give those back in some nice graphics. That way you could create your own very specific dashboard with all graphics and …

I went crazy from perl and the installation of their modules. For some icinga checks we need to install a few base perl packages using cpanminus. It's taking a long time before the installation succeeds depending on the internet connection or server specifications.

Using a puppet exec to automate this installation is frustrating because the timeout is unpredictable and could take hours from time to time!

So I started to look for a way to package it into an rpm which I can distribute over our own yum repository.

The first software I got reviewed is cpan2rpm, it looked promising …

I've used a lot's of tools to get a grip on my todo lists for work, for the scouting movement, for technical projects, household, etc. Started by using pen and paper, switched to a little notebook (which I still use for short-term tasks) to start using software to organize them.

I've used evernote, gtasks, tracks, github issues, gitlab issues, redmine tickets, in short plenty passed by only tracks survived. I still use it for my work related projects, everyday at 8:30AM I get my list of tasks for that day. That way I have some sort of control on …

Since I discovered the joy of using the ratpoison window manager I'm trying to do all tasks I need to perform on my system using the command line.

One of those frequently used tasks is printing out documents or scanning in files. Until today I used the software viewer of my documents to print and simple-scan to scan my files.

Nowadays I use the command line to perform those tasks. To print out documents I use the lp command:

"Get the status off all printers on your system"
$ lpc status all

"Print the desired file to a specific printer"
$ lpr …

Been asked to setup a software raid of 12TB on a minimal CentOS 6.4 installation with 5 disks of 3TB each. Never played with raid nor lvm before so the challenge was great!

I started by doing research about RAID. Came to the conclusion that RAID 5 was the best option for our purpose. So kept looking for a way to implement a software raid and stumbled into mdadm.

Using the information of Richard's and Zack Reed's blogs I easily setted up the raid array and created some lvm volumes on top of that.

Creating of 3TB …

Some weeks ago I was asked by a customer to implement a bot on an IRC channel. Did some research about this topic and stumbled on the github hubot.

The installation on a dedicated server running CentOS 6, using the irc adapter isn't hard. By following those steps you can easily start your own bot on a specified IRC channel.

You need some pre installed packages:

# yum install openssl openssl-devel openssl-static crypto-utils expat expat-devel gcc-c++ git

After installed those pre requirements nodejs is the next service we need. You can install the newest version using rpm packages you can find …

During this time of the year in Belgium most people needs to fill in their taxes forms.

Since a few years the Belgium government provided an electronic way to accomplish this task. Using a digital passport you can authenticate yourself.

I wanted to use this nice tool so I had to configure my local setup to have it all glued together on my linux machine.

The necessary steps I described in this post so other interested people can use their linux setups also to fill in the tax forms.

Installation

The mayor package to install on a fedora machine is …

My first steps in linux where on a ubuntu distribution, when you could order the ISO images on a cd-rom delivered by the post.

I liked it a lot and ever since I only used linux on my home based devices. Following the releases of Ubuntu. Starting at inuits I tried something else and installed CentOS desktop on my laptop. The idea behind this was to gain experience on the CentOS distributions.

Once I figured out that it didn't made sense since a laptop has other purposes then a server. By the time we got new machines I decided to …

Back in the days I once wrote a blogpost about a conky setup on a Ubuntu desktop. In the meantime I'm not using ubuntu anymore and kinda tweaked my whole conky setup. I switched to fedora 18 and using conky-colors those days in front of the ratpoison window manager.

This post will go trough all the steps I did to came to the actual result. When something isn't clear, or could be done on a more smoother/better way, please feel free to bug me about it!

Installing some required packages before actually compiling the conky-colors source:

$ sudo yum install …

To get an overview of my todo's I used to list them in google tasks. Back in time I was convinced it would nicely integrate with all tools software and distributions I would use. After some month's I figured out it wouldn't.

So I searched on the web for software which would take that task over from google. I used to play with several tools, from trac, to chiliproject to redmine. All those tools worked very nice but were some overkill to only manages todo lists.

In the meantime I installed gitlabhq, tried to abuse the issues there to manage …