HP Tech Forum 2008, here I come!

I'm officially registered for HP's Technology Forum 2008 in Vegas. I'm actually really looking forward to it because they have an awesome mix of infosec, linux and networking sessions! I'm stoked. If you're going to be there, let me know!

that blasted Alero blew another motor...and this time, it wasn't my fault.

Over the past six months, I estimate I've sunk very close to $2k into my car... and its not even paid for. $2k!!!! How? Well, $400 for snow tiers, $300 for summer tires, $500 for a new motor, and another $500 for ANOTHER new motor. Come to find out that the "quad four" that comes in the Alero is perhaps the world's worst motor. I'm so pissed.

TRENDnet TK-207K 2-Port USB KVM Switch

If you have a TRENDnet TK-207K KVM, which is a two-port KVM that only supports USB keyboard and mouse... you may have discovered that the SCRLK+SCRLK+UP key combination doesn't switch between workstations. I asked TRENDnet about this and they told me two key things: 1) that they don't support wireless keyboards, and 2) that if SCRLK doesn't work, to try NUMLK.

NUMLK worked. It is glorious.

FIERCE is re-born.

SAVAGE, and VENGENCE, my WinXP and Linux Laptop, have been joined by FIERCE, their Linux brother. FIERCE is a 1.7Ghz Athlon with a gig of RAM and 80GB of disk running Ubuntu 7.10.

FIERCE used to be the heart-and-soul of my on-line presence -- it had been a Red Hat-based box for seven years. My recent relocation to BlueHost for my web-hosting has meant I'm free to do whatever I want with the old server (a.k.a. PROFESSOR). I still don't know what I'm going to do.

Killing `fsck` on boot

Being a laptop Linux user, I turn my box off more than the average user (or, more accurately, it hangs coming out of suspend so I have to reboot)... the result is that my laptop decides to `fsck` the drives after so many reboots. This really really sucks because invariably it happens at the least opportune time. I've been raging about this, privately, for quite some time and today finally decided to do something about it. Enter `tune2fs`.

`tune2fs` is a utility that allows you to tune the file system parameters of ext2 and ext3 file-systems. There are two switches of particular import: -c and -i. -c controls how many mounts the volume can go through before having to go through a `fsck`, while -i controls how long between `fsck` intervals (in days, weeks, months, etc.)

From my experience, I know its a bad idea to disable `fsck` altogether on account of the slight yet horrible possibility that you could end-up with file-system corruption. That said, I also don't want it to happen except with the rarest of frequencies. SO, I disabled the mount counter and set the `fsck` interval to 3 months. I figure I can handle a reality in which I have to sit through a full-fledged `fsck` of my disks four times a year. Here's the actual command and its output.

cjsteele@vengence:~$ sudo tune2fs -c -1 -i 3m /dev/sda1
tune2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
Setting maximal mount count to -1
Setting interval between checks to 7776000 second
cjsteele@vengence:~$