I've used a lot's of tools to get a grip on my todo lists for work, for the scouting movement, for technical projects, household, etc. Started by using pen and paper, switched to a little notebook (which I still use for short-term tasks) to start using software to organize them.

I've used evernote, gtasks, tracks, github issues, gitlab issues, redmine tickets, in short plenty passed by only tracks survived. I still use it for my work related projects, everyday at 8:30AM I get my list of tasks for that day. That way I have some sort of control on …

I finally got to the point where I upgraded a whole puppet infrastructure from puppet 2.6.x to the last stable version of puppet, 3.3.0. And after finding out the way to go it was surprisingly easy and no big issues came across.

One of the main reasons to upgrade was to start using the latest version of foreman, were we used 0.4, so we can start provisioning our own development vm's with some fancy cloud solution like for example cloudstack using our production puppet tree.

Before the upgrade we had the puppet-client & server (2.6 …

Since I discovered the joy of using the ratpoison window manager I'm trying to do all tasks I need to perform on my system using the command line.

One of those frequently used tasks is printing out documents or scanning in files. Until today I used the software viewer of my documents to print and simple-scan to scan my files.

Nowadays I use the command line to perform those tasks. To print out documents I use the lp command:

"Get the status off all printers on your system"
$ lpc status all

"Print the desired file to a specific printer"
$ lpr …

Been asked to setup a software raid of 12TB on a minimal CentOS 6.4 installation with 5 disks of 3TB each. Never played with raid nor lvm before so the challenge was great!

I started by doing research about RAID. Came to the conclusion that RAID 5 was the best option for our purpose. So kept looking for a way to implement a software raid and stumbled into mdadm.

Using the information of Richard's and Zack Reed's blogs I easily setted up the raid array and created some lvm volumes on top of that.

Creating of 3TB …

Some weeks ago I was asked by a customer to implement a bot on an IRC channel. Did some research about this topic and stumbled on the github hubot.

The installation on a dedicated server running CentOS 6, using the irc adapter isn't hard. By following those steps you can easily start your own bot on a specified IRC channel.

You need some pre installed packages:

# yum install openssl openssl-devel openssl-static crypto-utils expat expat-devel gcc-c++ git

After installed those pre requirements nodejs is the next service we need. You can install the newest version using rpm packages you can find …

During this time of the year in Belgium most people needs to fill in their taxes forms.

Since a few years the Belgium government provided an electronic way to accomplish this task. Using a digital passport you can authenticate yourself.

I wanted to use this nice tool so I had to configure my local setup to have it all glued together on my linux machine.

The necessary steps I described in this post so other interested people can use their linux setups also to fill in the tax forms.

Installation

The mayor package to install on a fedora machine is …

My first steps in linux where on a ubuntu distribution, when you could order the ISO images on a cd-rom delivered by the post.

I liked it a lot and ever since I only used linux on my home based devices. Following the releases of Ubuntu. Starting at inuits I tried something else and installed CentOS desktop on my laptop. The idea behind this was to gain experience on the CentOS distributions.

Once I figured out that it didn't made sense since a laptop has other purposes then a server. By the time we got new machines I decided to …

Back in the days I once wrote a blogpost about a conky setup on a Ubuntu desktop. In the meantime I'm not using ubuntu anymore and kinda tweaked my whole conky setup. I switched to fedora 18 and using conky-colors those days in front of the ratpoison window manager.

This post will go trough all the steps I did to came to the actual result. When something isn't clear, or could be done on a more smoother/better way, please feel free to bug me about it!

Installing some required packages before actually compiling the conky-colors source:

$ sudo yum install …

To get an overview of my todo's I used to list them in google tasks. Back in time I was convinced it would nicely integrate with all tools software and distributions I would use. After some month's I figured out it wouldn't.

So I searched on the web for software which would take that task over from google. I used to play with several tools, from trac, to chiliproject to redmine. All those tools worked very nice but were some overkill to only manages todo lists.

In the meantime I installed gitlabhq, tried to abuse the issues there to manage …

Every time I want to join a channel on a jabber account using bitlbee I'm a bit confused and have to search the whole inter-webs before actually finding out howto configure my chat setup to do so.

My online search points me out to the bitlbee wiki. Nevertheless those commands never got to the point to have it actually working. After many attempts a colleague pointed me to the right solution.

To never forget it anymore and sharing the working setup with the world I summarize it in this blog post.

In your bitlbee control channel &bitlbee :

chat add [account …