This article was culled from How to create big-ass empty files in milliseconds . dd if=/dev/zero of=bigassfile bs=1M count=1 skip=9999 See what I did there? This command, issued in a console, literally means: Duplicate data from /dev/zero (a zero generator) into bigassfile.  Do it in blocks of ...

This article was culled from Starting ZFS-FUSE up properly Here is a collection of tips you must pay attention to: Put the ZFS PID file in the root filesystem. Unset the LANG environment variable.  Failure to do so will cause ZFS-FUSE to hang if your /usr is on ZFS. Immunize ZFS-FUSE against th...

Dear Lazyweb, I've got a variety of things (warez, porn, mp3s, cat pictures, $HOME backups) stored on a collection of drives. The valuable stuff gets stored on a RAID 1 (mirrored) drive. The expendable stuff gets stored on a RAID 0 (striped) drive. I figure it's time to get serious about fault-toler...

I'm working a bit late today as I had to schedule some downtime for a critical piece of hardware that needed to be powered down, lightly disassembled, have a part replaced and then powered back up. As I unscrewed the part to be replaced, I thought to myself "Boy, it'd sure stink if I ...

The problem For some time my Laptop and Desktop XP systems have been misbehaving, intermittently when going into hibernate, the desktop much more since it got its upgrade to 4 gigs of Ram. Symptoms include just going blank with heaps of hard disk activity and then just sitting with the HDD light fli...

Recently, we ran in to a problem with our web content sync setup. Old Setup: Host all web bits on two admin servers Pull via rsync from admin01 server to the apache servers on 5 min staggered cron That setup worked fairly well for us for quite a long time, but it doesn’t scale. At about 18 or ...

The security update routine sucks. 1. It places the damn install package on your desktop. Who the fuck wants that? Lame ass apple move. 2. It removed all of my disable plugins. permanently. 3. It still shows that damn update......