MiniDLNA SPEC & RPM

MiniDLNA provides an OpenSource DLNA server software that can index and present specific folders on your computer to DLNA clients on your network. Project at sourceforge is distributed as CVS code that you need to checkout and compile for it to work on your computer. I’ve setup a spec file that will allow you to create an rpm that has been tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 machine x86 for easing adoption among users. ...

July 10, 2009 · 2 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez

Mount disk images

I’ve been using a Xen guest under RHEL 5.2 to hold this Webserver, and because of failures, I choose to keep a copy of the full disk image on another machine. Having to transfer the full disk in the network means stop the server (Xen guest), rsync the image on disk (wait 40 minutes), then start guest again. After doing the initial image transfer, it would be easier to just sync updated files, but… how to loop mount a full disk? ...

July 18, 2008 · 2 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez

Logical volume manager (LVM)

Introduction LVM are the initials for Logical Volume Manager, a powerful tool present in actual Linux systems inspired in the implementation available in other systems like AIX and HP-UX. LVM introduces a separation between system structure and elements like disks, partitions, filesystems to which we are used to. LVM has three levels: Physical volumes Volume Groups Logical volumes One of the benefits of LVM over traditional systems is that LVM introduces an abstraction layer which improves the limitation of a disk, allowing us to have a filesystem to span over several disks, resizing thus making a more efficient usage of storage. ...

April 20, 2008 · 7 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux)

Introduction SELinux is an implementation of MAC (Mandatory Access Controls) over LSM (Linux Security Modules) in Linux Kernel. SELinux, originally developed by N.S.A. (National Security Agency) allows applications to be confined by the kernel. Inside that “confined area”, much more grained than a standard chroot (system where basic executables are copied to another folder in order to have a small subsystem isolated from real system. The drawback is that a small subsystem could have enough utilities to reveal private information from our internal network),in which we can allow only certain operations, for example: adding information to a file, read from a directory but not writing, even just for one file in a standard directory, etc… ...

January 4, 2008 · 7 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez

Creating Jigsaw Download (JigDo) files for downloading ISO's

Introduction JigDo (JIGsaw DOwnload) is a small utility that can assemble a CD/DVD image from it’s internal files. For example, Debian has been using it for years for distributing the entire distribution: you downloaded a .jigdo file, and then, using the utility jigdo-lite (package jigdo-file on Debian like and RPM based1. This way, you only downloaded small files from servers, preventing line failures, spreading load between several servers, etc. Furthermore, if you already had some files (for example if you started at version X and have been downloading and keeping all files until X.Y, jigdo, can use those updated files to compare them against the .jigdo file and avoid downloading duplicated files… ...

November 15, 2007 · 3 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez
This blog is a participant in the Amazon Associate Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.