Want a cool login screen when you login to the linux shell at the console of via ssh? All you need to do is modify the /etc/motd file:
]# cat /etc/motd
. . . |
| | |,---.| ,---.,---.,-.-.,---.
| | ||---'| | | || | ||---'
`-'-'`---'`---'`---'`---'` ' '`---'
__,-----._ ,-.
,' ,-. \`---. ,-----<._/
(,.-. o:.` )),"\\-._ ,' `.
('"-` .\ \`:_ )\ `-;'-._ \
,,-. \` ; : \( `-' ) -._ : `:
( \ `._\\ ` ; ; ` : )
\`. `-. __ , / \ ;, (
`.`-.___--' `- / ; | : |
`-' `-.`--._ ' ; |
(`--._`. ; /\ |
\ ' \ , ) :
| `--::---- \' ; ;|
\ .__,- ( ) : 
\ : `------; \ | | ;
\ : / , ) | | (
\ \ `-^-| | / , ,\
) ) | -^- ; `-^-^'
_,' _ ; | |
/ , , ,' /---. :
`-^-^' ( : :,'
`-^--'
Just place in your preferred art/text with your preferred editor and your good to go!
22
Verizon FIOS – My review of the service after 1 year of use
0 Comments | Posted by dlarmeir in Past Blogs
I purchased Verizon FIOS a little over a year ago and have been using it daily since that time. I have to admit that FIOS is the best internet I have ever used in a residential capacity. There are some pros and cons though I will list below:
Pros:
Lightning fast – I can generally meet or even exceed my plan. Most ISP’s cut you under your max throughput. – I am using the 25/25 as of this time.
Good uptime – I have only had one 5 minute outage since I started using the service. Other than that it has been up all of the time.
Sales/Support – Anytime we call they are polite and get things taken care of quickly.
Cons:
Price - price tends to be a bit high but you do get what you pay for
Filtered ports – The filtering of port 80 is annoying, but made up for by allowing 443. I understand the reasoning for this though as people may try to host malicous sites and this could present abuse issues. Other ports like 25 are filtered but this doesn’t bother me.
Crapware – When the verizon techs install the service they install crapware on yoru computer. ( this is perhaps the most annoying thing)
MOCA – Media over Coax is a pain in the neck and now Verizon’s default install. You can get cat 5 activated from the ONT upon request though.
For a tech like me FIOS is awesome! it is fast enough for me to host offsite backups and make the Internet an enjoyable experience. If you are shopping for Internet I would recommend seeing if it is available in your area.
13
The fast and the furious arcade machine BSOD oh nooozz
0 Comments | Posted by dlarmeir in Past Blogs
I was at the arcade a couple of months ago and wanted to play the fast and the furious tokyo drift arcade game. Much to my dissapointment it was BSOD’d
Looks like an NVidia crash to me………………
Seems even an arcade machine with windows that serves only one purpose in life can’t even remain stable.
This is in reference to http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10433745-265.html
Rarely do I give opinions in matters relating to politics or activism, but today is a new day. Google does many great things for the Internet as I can attest to every day, but also does some bad. Google being a part of China’s internet service in the first place was a horrible idea… Google to an extent was just as equally responsible for blocking freedom as China was. In fact Google has helped China suppress and oppress it’s people through it’s search filtering. Why would a company built on the founding principals of Capitalism help to advance the agenda of such a communist regime? You would think that an American company built from free information/searching would know better. I doubt anybody from Google even hears this lone voice on the net, but you need to straighten up, be American and take care of business. I hope you do live up to what you have been saying and your principals and show China whats up.
For those of you who regularily read my blog I am sorry I haven’t written anything new lately. I will have some good stuff up here soon – just have a back log of projects including two sites I am building and my regular job. My Nginx howto will be here soon 
I hope everyone has had a happy holiday season thus far!
I recently migrated this site over to nginx as I have seen that many large enterprises are using it and I wanted to learn it better so I can in turn help others. This server doesn’t have the bells in whistles that Apache has but it is extremely fast and as a proxy is highly effective. Per the wikipedia this server has the following features:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx
Basic HTTP features
* Handling of static files, index files and auto-indexing
* Reverse proxy with caching
* Load balancing
* fault tolerance
* SSL support
* FastCGI support, with caching, although it doesn’t have CGI support.
* Name- and IP-based virtual servers
* FLV streaming
* MP4 streaming, using the MP4 streaming module
* Web page access authentication
* gzip compression
Mail proxy features
* SMTP, POP3 and IMAP proxy
* STARTTLS support
* SSL support
Installation of the webserver was really easy and didn’t take much time at all. I will be writing a howto on how to compile it and get everything working soon. Stay tuned
For those who visit my blog often I am sorry for the downtime. I moved over to a new hosting setup and ran into a few migration issues ( I completely changed my entire hosting platform on a planned maintenance) and the site was down for a little under 18 hours. Everything is good now through – not without pulling some hair out though
UFC 103 came to Dallas last weekend and it was a blast! I got hooked up with a free ticket to attend, I don’t attend public events often so this was a very big experience. Our seats were pretty good and below is a picture o fmy view of the octagon taken from my blackberry:
This picture was taken during the prelims but believe me, the America Airlines center filled up to capacity later that night. Here are the fights from that night taken from the wikipedia:
——————————————————————————-
Preliminary card
* Lightweight bout:Rob Emerson vs. Rafael dos Anjos
dos Anjos defeated Emerson via unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 30-27).
* Light Heavyweight bout: Vladimir Matyushenko vs. Igor Pokrajac
Matyushenko defeated Pokrajac via unanimous decision (30-27, 30-27, 30-27).
* Light Heavyweight bout: Eliot Marshall vs. Jason Brilz
Marshall defeated Brilz via split decision (28-30, 30-27, 30-27).
* Welterweight bout:Rick Story vs. Brian Foster
Story defeated Foster via submission (arm triangle choke) at 1:09 of round 2.
* Lightweight bout: Rafaello Oliveira vs. Nik Lentz
Lentz defeated Oliveira via unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 30-27).
* Lightweight bout: Jim Miller vs. Steve Lopez
Miller defeated Lopez via TKO (injury) at 0:48 of round 2.
* Middleweight bout: Drew McFedries vs. Tomasz Drwal
Drwal defeated McFedries via submission (rear naked choke) at 1:03 of round 2.
* Lightweight bout: Efrain Escudero vs. Cole Miller
Escudero defeated Miller via TKO (punches) at 3:36 of round 1.
Main card
* Catchweight (159 lb) bout: Tyson Griffin vs. Hermes Franca
Griffin defeated Franca via KO (punches) at 3:26 of round 2.
* Welterweight bout: Josh Koscheck vs. Frank Trigg
Kosheck defeated Trigg via TKO (punches) at 1:25 of round 1.
* Welterweight bout: Martin Kampmann vs. Paul Daley
Daley defeated Kampmann via TKO (punches) at 2:31 of round 1.
* Heavyweight bout: Mirko Filipovic vs. Junior dos Santos
dos Santos defeated Filipovic via submission (punches) at 2:00 of round 3.
* Catchweight (195 lb) bout: Rich Franklin vs. Vitor Belfort
Belfort defeated Franklin via KO (punches) at 3:02 of round 1.
——————————————————————————-
I also go caught on video goofing off with a coworker and doing the robot!
If you ever get a chance to go to a UFC event, I highly recommend it!
12
Linux kernel 2.6.31 – Desktop speed enhancements and other improvements.
0 Comments | Posted by dlarmeir in Past Blogs
I was reading this morning how the new 2.6.31 kernel was released on the 10th and how it has several speed improvements implemented so I decided to give it a test run. I compiled the kernel from source in Ubuntu 9.04 32 bit (i386) using modified instructions from my previous post:
http://larmeir.com/2009/07/enabling-pae-on-a-32-bit-ubuntu-desktop-supporting-up-to-64-gb/
On first login I encountered a bit of a bug as my audio was showing Null in the volume control. The sound worked on boot and played at splash but crashed once GDM completed loading. I rebooted and then the issue went away and so far so good. Some of the improvements made with this kernel release are shown below:
“This version adds USB 3.0 support, a equivalent of FUSE for character devices used for proxying OSS sound to ALSA, some memory management changes that improve interactivity in desktops, readahead improvements, ATI Radeon Modesetting support, support for Intel’s Wireless Multicomm 3200 Wifi devices, kernel support and a userspace tool for performance counters, gcov support, a memory checker for unitialized memory, a memory leak detector, a reimplementation of inotify and dnotify on top of a new filesystem notification infrastructure, btrfs improvements, support for the IEEE 802.15.4 network standard, IPv4 over Firewire, many new drivers, small improvements and fixes.”
For a more in depth list go here:
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_31
If anyone has any questions about my compilation process let me know – Dustin
