Jascha IS Me

I have been using an Ubuntu desktop for the last few years doing the version upgrades and having no issues to speak of with it. But I also started to notice that the system was being a bit slow with larger applications like Firefox and others. Recently I have been moving back to my roots in terms of using terminal apps over pretty GUI versions. So I decided to take on the challenge of doing my once every two years complete reinstall of my home desktop with a slant on minimalism and cleanness.

I looked at various “distributions” like Crunch Bang, Dream Linux, Arch Linux, and countless others.  Yet it is somewhat of a stretch to call most of them distributions since just bundling and branding or Debian based packages. So I decided to just go to the source and roll my own. This is by far the best option for a clean minimal desktop with only what you need and will use on it.

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I have been posting *nix apps and news to a new Tumblr called Terminal Dreams for those interested in that sort of thing.

I manage many servers in my line of work and have found a few things to make life a little easier when it comes to SSH’ing into them when I start my laptop up.The first of these is maintaining an up to date ssh config file which is kept in ~/.ssh that allows me to alias the server address and key. A basic entry in the config file would be for an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance:

Host prod-servername01
HostName ec2-184-88-888-88.compute-1.amazonaws.com
User someuser
IdentityFile /.ssh_keys/servergroup.pem

Once you have all your servers in the config file I create a very simple script to start gnome-terminal with each group of servers:

gnome-terminal --tab --title=prod-servername01 -e 'ssh prdo-servername01' --tab --title=prod-servername02 -e 'ssh prod-servername02'

From the above example you can get the idea of adding more tabs for each additional server. I then create desktop or menu shortcuts for each grouping of server to launch a terminal and ssh into all in the group.

I tend to always need to find the huge log files that are filling up servers. One fast way is to use find and awk to list them in human readable form:

find / -type f -size +20000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

Int he above example I am using find / which will search entire root filesystem. You can change this to /var/log of any path you want to find the largest files. You can also change the 20000k to a smaller or larger size (20000k = 19.53 MB).

I have been using the free 2GB Dropbox account to store my SSH keys for our servers. Along with my mutt and other configuration files. The best part of Dropbox on Linux is being able to symlink things into the Dropbox directory to allow me to have the same configurations on all the various computers I use.

Basically what I do is have a .ssh_keys directory in my main computer’s home directory which I symlink in my Dropbox directory. Then on other computers I create a:

ln -s /home/myuser/Dropbox/.ssh_keys /home/myuser/.ssh_keys

I do the same with my .muttrc and any other configs I want to use. I even keep my wallpapers in the Dropbox folder where my awesome config file randomly loads one using:

awsetbg -f -r /home/myuser/Dropbox/wallpapers/

For some time I have been using Ubuntu as my desktop distribution.  Recently even though my computer is quite powerful I have run into issues of slow going. The first thing I did was change to using Google Chrome for my daily browsing and Firefox as my backup browser for certain things.  This has helped the issue greatly by just using Chrome and closing Firefox on occasion and restarting it when slowness occurs.  Yet the speed still was not there as it use to be for me.  So I made a simple but effective change to my desktop environment.  I switched from Gnome to IceWM which has made all the difference in the world. Gone are the nifty yet resource intensive Compiz trickery replaced by pure simplistic beauty.  Reminding me more of the basic X Windows days when all you needed was a terminal and your favorite shell. It seems in an effort to appease the Windows types the Linux sect has made their desktops bloated just like what they were trying to avoid doing.  I only use a small handful of things throughout my day.

• Browser
• XTerm
• gedit (or similar text editor)
• pidgin (for IM)

That is about it.  I sometimes might open GIMP to edit an image or something to manage images when I upload them.  But this is not a daily occurrence. For work I now use Google Apps which includes Google Docs so there is not even a need to use OpenOffice or a PDF viewer for that matter.  It’s a minimal new world and I am just fine with that.

I use Linux (Ubuntu) as my desktop and have used some flavor of Linux as my desktop for many years now. Most of this time I have used Firefox as my main browser. Recently I have started using Chrome as well as a secondary browser in order to see if I like it more. There are a few things that I like about Chrome more than Firefox. Chrome seems to hog less memory and not hang as much when a lot of tabs are open. Which is a big plus for me since I always end up with many tabs open. Being that I use Google Apps for a lot of things it helps to have a browser that does not come to a crawl after half a day of using it heavily. Now for the things I do not like (yet) about Chrome.

• The Firefox Delicious plugin is very nice and integrated. Chrome equivalents are just prettied up basic bookmarker.
• The strange download manager
• Flash player crashing on regular basis (for Linux at least)
• Strange formatting of some sites including GMail and other Google Apps sites

For the most part I see myself using Chrome more often and if I could get the same sort of Delicious plugin as Firefox has I would be much more likely to use it exclusively. Although I have read that the next version of Firefox is suppose to fill the gap Chrome is creating.

We shall see. . .

I have been reading recently about the “Lean Startup” concept, which is funny since I have been working with and been part of more than a few without knowing there is a nifty catch phrase for them. So now I am all up on the lingo and hash tag #leanstartup I can speak on it. Today is the perfect time to take a gamble and dive into a lean startup. Being that there are so many free tools and services you can use along with very inexpensive solutions to infrastructure that were not available even a few years ago. By using the power of Open Source software, free online services, and cloud computing one can build a scalable and very cost effective lean startup.

Core Needs

Let’s first look at your new companies hosting and servers.  being that you are lean you may most likely be working from home.  So let’s look at hosting and services you will need in order to host some of the Open Source applications will will talk about in a moment.  In my experience the basic things you need to get going in terms of setting up shop are the basics:

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When we were setting up our locking cabinets at the new data center for my job I was wondering how to actively monitor the security around our cabinets. Being that only myself and the data center staff have keys to the cabinets I wanted to be able to monitor when anyone entered them. I came up with a simple solution to be able to monitor the racks and keep track of changes. First I downloaded ZoneMinder, which is cam software that runs on Linux. It allows you to setup cheap consumer grade cams to monitor security. With such advanced features as motion detection. This made it ideal for my needs since I could go buy two cheap $30 web cams to use for front and back of cabinets. Then all I had to do was install ZoneMinder on our monitoring server and configure it for motion detection captures. Now the only step for me to do was put a sign-in sheet inside our cabinet with fields for techs name, date, time, and what was done in cabinet. Then require the data center staff to fill out the sheet every time they enter the rack. Another good idea is to do this before signing a contract with the data center you have chosen. Then you can stipulate that if they enter the rack without signing the sheet you get X amount off your bill that month for each infraction.