The Open Source Journal

RedHat's enterprise operating system doesn't provide support for XFS out of the box, due to support limitations. XFS is a mature and stable file system however, and has benefits in a number of areas, including file streaming, snapshotting, growing, and online defragmentation. In this brief article, I'll walk you through the process of adding XFS support to your RHEL5 (or CentOS) boxes.

XFS comes in two parts: userland tools (xfsprogs) for creating/checking/etc XFS partitions and xfs-kmod, the kernel module required to support XFS.

RedHat is one of the most widely used Linux distribution, at least in the corporate and academic sectors. It's been around for years and after all the shit they've gotten from users trapped in RPM "dependency hell," you'd think they'd have learned SOMETHING by now, right?...Right?

When I first entered the Linux world a decade ago, my desktop experience was pretty was pretty abysmal: just xterms started by running the 'startx' command. It wasn't until much later, late 2000, that I started using KDE. I was in love.

Quite often you run into new problems that don't have an immediate and clear solution. Generally these errors appear as cryptic lines in dmesg, who's subsequent googling reveals little to no detail of the true issue. This time, it was some lines concerning my hard drives (which always raise concern). It can be frustrating solving problems that seemingly no one else has encountered, but it's part of every IT person's job. Perhaps I should make this a weekly column...

Early adopters of Gentoo will remember Daniel Robbins, or drobbins as he was more commonly known, the creator of Gentoo Linux, for his excellently written documentation on IBM developerWorks, commitment to Gentoo, activity in the community, and eventual high profile departure from Gentoo. But did you know he's still contributing to Gentoo in different ways?

Now that the era of 1 TB drives is upon us, we're rapidly closing in on a limitation imposed by the legacy x86 MBR which contains the OS loader and partition tables. Due to the 32-bit nature of the MBR, the maximum partition size is 2 TB; a limit that must have seemed impossibly large 20 years ago, when hard disks were measured in MB and only the largest hard drives were more than one hundred megabytes in size!

Linux has come a long way in the last 10 years, especially when it comes to the desktop. Distributions like Mandriva, Ubuntu, and Fedora are leading examples of success in the Linux desktop world. But despite the excellent work these distributions and the thousands of open source developers have done, mainstream Linux adoption on the Desktop is marginal at best.

It's not that Linux isn't ready or the technology isn't there yet. It's all about implementation.

I can't recall the first mail transport agent (MTA) that I used when I first got started with Gentoo. I'm fairly certain it was not sendmail and I think it was, in fact, postfix itself (this is way before Gentoo made ssmtp the default). Since I had no interest in running an email server back then, I used it only for local mail delivery, and as it turns out, configuring postfix for local mail delivery only is surprisingly easy.

I run a small, non-anonymous FTP server for myself and some friends, primarily to use as a server for the excellent Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. It's simple and gets the job done and I'm not particularly concerned with security (obviously).

After being inaccessible for several weeks (if not months), I was finally able to get my hands on some kernel patches for Reiser4. I originally found the patches and software below on this site.

Without further ado:

6c55201acd2a2c0a1f46addf248da6a2   libaal-1.0.5.tar.gz
8c618e35a4a893f0e948b03cee25749d   reiser4progs-1.0.6.tar.gz