Category: Tech
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Root Bionic / Razr with Ice Cream Sandwich from OSX
Dan Rosenberg (@djrbliss), a security researcher, recently published an exploit for Motorola RAZR devices running Ice Cream Sandwich which allows you to gain root access. Ice Cream Sandwich is about to be released for the Motorola Bionic, and fortunately Dan’s vulnerability exploit works for the Bionic also. Unfortunately, it only run on MS Windows, so…
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Installing a leaked ICS build on a Droid Bionic from OSX
I spent quite some time over the last few days getting together the process for installing the latest leaked ICS builds on my Droid Bionic. There’s a lot of information but I was working under some specific constraints: I’m using OSX, and not MS Windows I have a rooted Bionic I didn’t want to lose…
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Tornado Alert App
I live two hours south of Joplin, MO. Almost a year ago a tornado drove through the middle of this small town and destroyed everything in its path. I had only recently moved to this area and figured that while it was really bad, it may not be entirely uncommon. Then I did a bad…
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Slow shell open in OSX Lion
Do you find that opening a new tab in Terminal, or iTerm takes a long time? Maybe 5 to 10 seconds, instead of being nearly instant? If so, you may want to take a look at Apple’s syslog replacement called ASL. ASL stores its logs on OSX Lion, under /var/log/asl/. When Terminal or iTerm open,…
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Significantly increase your 4G Android’s battery life
Sounds like either a lie, or spam, right? Not so! In the last week I have managed to triple the battery life of my Droid Bionic, with one Android setting and one simple app. A word of warning: This method will work best if you are in areas where there are WiFi connections available. If…
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So you want to be a Systems Administrator?
Recently I wrote about the shortage of entry level Operations people. These are the people who run the millions of computers that make everything in our daily lives possible. Without them, there would be no large working computer systems, anywhere. Imagine a world where air traffic controllers don’t have computers, where you need to talk…
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The Future of Operations
This week I was at Velocity Conf with most of the Etsy Ops team. We had people talking, people helping, and people having great fun all week long. Towards the end of the week, during the DevOps Days meetings, I had a chat with John Allspaw and the other members of the team about the…
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Creating an LVM-backed FreeBSD DomU in a Linux Dom0
Greetings! As the topic suggests we’re going to play with Xen and set up a FreeBSD DomU inside a Linux Dom0. First some important information: Background We’re going to be running a PV (para-virtualised) installation of 32-bit FreeBSD. Unfortunately my older hardware doesn’t support the HVM (hardware virtual machine) CPU extensions, and at the time…
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Run commands against all of your Puppet or Chef hosts
Both Puppet and Chef are incredibly powerful tools, and they are great at allowing your servers to keep themselves up to date. However, there comes a time in every sysadmin’s life when they find there is a need to poll a large number of servers in their infrastructure. They’re faced with two problems: How do…
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Creating an SVN mirror
If you haven’t had the pleasure of working with a distributed version control system such as Mercurial or Git, you may find that it necessary to take some manual steps to set up a mirror of your repository. For SVN, this process isn’t well integrated into the system itself, but there are tools we can…
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