Category Archives: Free software

Hack of the day: change your Netflix password from the command line

My kids watch a lot of Netflix. Some of them watch it too much, and my wife and I want to be able to turn off the spigot at night so that they’ll go to sleep without us having to confiscate all the phones and tablets in the house. Unfortunately, Netflix doesn’t have parental controls… Read More: Hack of the day: change your Netflix password from the… »

PenguinDome: new, open-source Linux mobile device management (MDM) solution

Where I work, we have employees who use (in decreasing order of popularity) Mac OS, Windows, and Linux as their desktop computers. We’ve deployed a large, complex remote administration / MDM application for managing the Mac OS and Windows desktops. It’s big and complicated and difficult to maintain. It does much more than we will… Read More: PenguinDome: new, open-source Linux mobile device management (MDM) solution »

HOWTO: Converting an unencrypted Ubuntu root disk to encrypted

The best way to configure Ubuntu for an encrypted root filesystem is to tell the installer to do it when you’re installing the operating system. It’s complicated, and smart people have put a lot of effort into making the installer know how to do it properly. Having said that, if you’re an experienced Linux sysadmin… Read More: HOWTO: Converting an unencrypted Ubuntu root disk to encrypted »

Python: How to make Flask work with Logbook

If you’ve arrived at this page, it’s probably because you’re searching the web for an answer why, even though you’ve called logbook.compat.redirect_logging() in your Python Flask app, you’re still not getting any Flask logging in your log files. The problem is that Flask sets the propagate flag on its logger to False by default, so even though Logbook’s… Read More: Python: How to make Flask work with Logbook »

How to hose your web server by releasing free software

I run a virtual server on Linode which hosts, among other things, the blog you are currently reading. The server doesn’t get a lot of traffic and is rarely busy or overloaded, so when I get an alert from Linode that its CPU has been pegged for the past two hours, as I did early… Read More: How to hose your web server by releasing free software »

How to delete your LiveJournal account

LiveJournal recently changed their Terms of Service. Many people are unwilling to accept the new Terms of Service. Some people even find them so unacceptable that they want to delete their LiveJournal accounts. The only way to delete one’s LiveJournal account is via the Account Status page. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to access that page without… Read More: How to delete your LiveJournal account »

Linux: What to do when the oom-killer is being triggered when you have plenty of memory

Does this sound familiar to you? Your Linux box has plenty of memory, but the kernel “oom-killer” keeps getting triggered and killing processes. The stack trace logged by the kernel shows that out_of_memory was triggered inside _do_fork (for me, it was mysqld forks that were triggering the problem; though I’d been running mysqld on my… Read More: Linux: What to do when the oom-killer is being triggered… »