What if you decided that you wanted to experiment and test within a chroot(ed) environment? And then something went wrong and you had to start all over again from scratch? Big headache, too much pain, especially with RPM based distributions. Well don’t do that then, here’s an interesting approach. Use aufs2, a stackable filesystem. An [...]

To bootstrap CentOS in Gentoo, I did the following. It basically installs the essential CentOS components into the specified directory, and from there on, chroot into that directory and perform tests, etc. First off, you’ll need to unmask a few packages(replace ~amd64 with ~x86 if your on the x86 architecture), and enable the flag sqlite [...]

If you were running a cluster of Gentoo driven machines, would you actually compile source for each of them? Or rather use binary packages? Gentoo’s masterpiece is binpkg, when you compile for one machine, you don’t have to recompile throughout, use quickpkg to build binary packages. Such packages can be hosted over a central server [...]

Reading logs could never become any more easier, at just a keystroke, you have your logs displayed where you want, in some fancy colour. They look great too. TTY’s can be accessed by pressing Alt + Ctrl + F[1 - 12] simultaneously. In the following, you’ll get a decent, colourized log display of /var/log/messages when [...]

Let’s admit it, we’re all lazy system admins. The bash completion in any other distribution is incomplete, and not as powerful as the one in Gentoo. It just does not work the way it works so brilliantly in Gentoo Linux. Ofcourse, you can port that same source to other distributions. To enable bash completion in [...]