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Spam Log is a WordPress plugin that writes a log entry for every comment marked as spam. The log file is suitable for processing by fail2ban.

• Tags admin, development, fail2ban, iptables, wordpress

Learn how to filter iptables log messages to a separate file. Two methods are presented: one using traditional syslog and one using rsyslog.

• Tags admin, firehol, firewall, howto, iptables, logrotate, rsyslog

The second part of an article/tutorial on using the YSlow firebug extension to optimize web site performance.

• Tags admin, apache, css, development, html, performance, yslow

An article/tutorial on using the YSlow firebug extension to optimize web site performance.

• Tags admin, apache, css, development, html, performance, yslow

Firefox 3 added native form widgets on Linux. Most of the time they look great, but on some sites including mine, they look awful. Here’s how I styled my forms to avoid native widgets.

• Tags css, development, firefox, forms

Simply unmounting a filesystem is not the ideal way to remove an external USB/firewire/SATA drive in Linux. This tutorial explains why and gives a solution.

• Tags admin, backup, howto

S.M.A.R.T. is a system in modern hard drives designed to report conditions that may indicate impending failure. smartmontools is a free software package that can monitor S.M.A.R.T. attributes and run hard drive self-tests. Although smartmontools runs on a number of platforms, I will only cover installing and configuring it on Linux.

• Tags admin, howto, smart

The awstats package in Debian is pretty outdated. Etch has version 6.5. Sid has 6.7. Version 6.9 was released on December 28, 2008. I’m a statistics junky and the new version has better robot detection so I built an updated package on my lenny/sid machine: awstats_69-1_all.deb. This package also works perfectly on my etch server without [...]

• Tags awstats, debian

Logical Volume Management is a vast improvement over standard partitioning schemes. Among many other things, it allows you to decrease the size of a volume without recreating it completely. Here’s how.

• Tags admin, howto, lvm

Running uTorrent under wine works pretty well in Linux. One problem with installing under wine is that file associations are not set correctly. This means that double-clicking a .torrent file or opening a .torrent link in your browser won’t automatically start uTorrent. Here’s how to solve that.

• Tags gnome, utorrent, wine

There are a few tricks to getting RealPlayer to work right under x86_64 Linux. Realplayer is a 32-bit application and needs a bit of coercing to run smoothly.

• Tags amd64, debian, realplayer, x86_64

I prefer GNOME for the most part, but some KDE applications are simply better than their GNOME counterparts. That said, there are some problems getting them to work well together. I recently discovered that installing k3b cause my GNOME menus to, for lack of a better word, explode. Here’s how I went about fixing them.

• Tags debian, gnome, kde, ubuntu

There are two different ways to monitor a UPS with nut: either expose the UPS hardware to GNOME Power Manager through hal or monitor the UPS directly with upsmon and upsd. There are trade-offs with each approach. Let’s take a look at both.

• Tags debian, nut, ubuntu, ups