Inspecting power states on Debian with turbostat

Turbostat is a utility created by Intel to check your (Intel) CPU's power states. It used to be part of the acpidump package, but not anymore. There are no prebuilt Debian binaries around; Ubuntu still packages it with the linux-tools package, which is linked to the kernel. Since Debian Testing …

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OpenWrt VLANs: a primer

Use case

The Belgian ISP Telenet supplies their TV customers with a DVR (called 'Digicorder') along with their own modem/router combination. As long as you do not implement your own network behind their modem/router, all is fine, and your DVR is fully functional ('interactive'). It's not completely clear …

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Centralising powersaving through udev

With computer usage becoming increasingly mobile - first laptops, then handhelds, and now smartphones and tablets - power consumption has become a hot topic. Linux has traditionally been a bit lacking in this department, playing catch-up to Windows; and while it's still not nearly as easy on a regular Linux installation to …

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Manipulating MKV audio and subtitle tracks with mkvtoolnix

Matroska files often contain multiple audio or subtitle tracks. The former can take up quite a bit of space in HD rips with multiple audio streams. Editing MKV containers is not only interesting if you want remove streams; you can also integrate subtitles, set a track as default, or have …

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Automatically shutting down an MPD server on inactivity

Nowadays all modern Linux GUIs have powersaving options that allow you, like Windows, to set timeouts for inactivity. Even 'dumb' electronics like TVs, AVRs etc. have such functionality. However, for headless Linux setups, this seems to be a problem. You can e.g. set a timeout for pm-suspend, but this …

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Automating ZFS pools maintenance

If you 'value your data', as some people would say, they are not a lot of filesystems you should entrust your data to. The main Linux and Windows file systems are not fit for it, since they have not been designed to handle things like bit rot. "But I have …

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Lighttpd reverse proxy for Sickbeard e.a.

Services like Sickbeard and CouchPotato come with their own web server. This makes setting them up a breeze, but it also means you'll have multiple webservers running on your system. The built-in webserver runs on a predefined non-standard port, so as not to interfere with any regular web servers already …

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Simple Lighttpd chroot on Debian

This will get you an easily maintainable chrooted Lighttpd setup with PHP and SQLite support, so you can run Drupal. Lua support is added for clean URLs, since people often want this on their Drupal setup.

Originally, this was tested and deployed on Debian 7 (Wheezy), but after upgrading to …

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SSH agent and SSHFS

My server used to run NFS v3 so I could easily manage my multimedia collection from my local laptop. I found out a few months ago NFS v4 boasts quite some improvements over v3, so I planned on migrating. Unfortunately that never got further than the stage of building the …

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