Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Disruptive Library Technology Jester

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Peter E. Murray

Library technologist, open source advocate, striving to think globally while acting locally

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  • Tethering a Ubiquity Network to a Mobile Hotspot

    I saw it happen.

    The cable-chewing device
    The contractor in the neighbor's back yard with the Ditch Witch trencher burying a cable. I was working outside at the patio table and just about to go into a Zoom meeting. Then the internet dropped out. Suddenly, and with a wrenching feeling …

     Posted on  April 21, 2020
     and last updated October 04, 2022
     ·  8 minutes reading time
  • Thursday Threads: Developer Genders, Facebook Release Engineering, Alcohol Among Technologists

    You'll get the sense that this week's Thursday Threads is stacked towards cultural awareness. First is the view of a developer of the female gender in a room of peers at a meeting of the Digital Public Library of America. The second thread is a pointer to a story about …

     Posted on  April 12, 2012
     and last updated April 12, 2012
     ·  13 minutes reading time
  • Fixing a Bad SSH authorized_keys under Amazon EC2

    I was doing some maintenance on the Amazon EC2 instance that underpins DLTJ and in the process managed to mess up the .ssh/authorized_keys file. (Specifically, I changed the permissions so it was group- and world-readable, which causes `sshd` to not allow users to log in using those private keys …

     Posted on  July 11, 2011
     and last updated July 12, 2011
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Split Routing with OpenVPN

    My place of work has installed a VPN that moderates our access to the server network using the OpenVPN protocol. This is a good thing, but in its default configuration it would send all traffic -- even that not destined for the machine room network -- through the VPN. Since most of …

     Posted on  February 15, 2010
     and last updated February 15, 2010
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Note to Future Self: Use `ssh -D` to bypass annoying interception proxies

    Dear future self,

    If you are reading this, you are remembering a time when you ran into a really nasty interception proxy ((Version of the "Proxy Server" Wikipedia page when this posting was written)) and you are looking for a way around it. Do you remember when you were sitting …

     Posted on  February 18, 2008
     and last updated February 18, 2008
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • DLTJ Updated, Readers Yawn

    At least I hope that is the correct headline. I've been having some problems with this installation of WordPress lately -- in particular, I could no longer activate or deactivate plugins -- and the only solution offered in the WordPress codex was to start with a fresh installation of WordPress. Now you …

     Posted on  January 27, 2008
     and last updated January 28, 2008
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • "Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide"

    Cover of “Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide”The title of this post is the same as the report it describes, Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide [PDF]. It was announced by Ronald Deibert last week on his blog at Citizen Lab. The one sentence synopsis goes like this: "This guide is meant to introduce …

     Posted on  October 18, 2007
     and last updated October 18, 2007
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Killing Off Runaway Apache Processes

    Well, something is still going wrong on dltj.org — despite previous performance tuning efforts, I'm still running into cases where machine performance grinds to a halt. In debugging it a bit further, I've found that the root cause is an apache httpd process which wants to consume nearly all of …

     Posted on  February 26, 2007
     and last updated February 26, 2007
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • WordPress/MySQL Tuning

    dltj.org runs on a relatively tiny box — a Pentium III with 512MB of RAM. I'm running a Gentoo Linux distribution, so I actually have a prayer of getting useful work out of the machine (it server is actually a recycled Windows desktop), but the performance just wasn't great. As …

     Posted on  February 22, 2007
     and last updated February 22, 2007
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • Getting Around Drupal's Prohibition of @ Characters in User Ids

    A while back we created an LDAP directory to consolidate account information for various back-room services, and when we created it we decided to use the individual's e-mail address as the account identifier (uid in LDAP-speak). It seemed like the logical thing to do -- it is something that the user …

     Posted on  January 19, 2007
     and last updated January 15, 2018
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • Managing a Gentoo Linux Server Configuration with Subversion, GLCU, and Trac

    Keeping track of configuration changes to servers is a tough job made tougher when some of the sysadmins work from home. Questions of who did what when and why can be exacerbated by the lack of physical proximity --- in other words, I can't simply yell over the cubical wall to …

     Posted on  December 22, 2006
     and last updated January 15, 2018
     ·  12 minutes reading time