May 25, 2010
My main Fedora workstation is an HP desktop. It’s got a Core i7 quad CPU (Q9300), 8GB RAM, and dual boots Windows 7 and Fedora 13.
Dear lazyweb, how can I make this system as quite on Fedora as it is on Windows? It’s absolutely silent when Win7 is running, but when Fedora is running the fans are quite noisy. Most of the time the system has a load average of 0.00 so it isn’t CPU spiking causing the fans to go full-bore. For temperatures I have Core0 at about 51C and Core1 at 44C and the other two cores at 48C, but the fans are running at 1583 and 1160 rpm. I can’t get the sensors to pick up temps or fan speeds on Win7 for some reason so don’t have a basis for comparison (tried a few of those “gadgets” and none show me temperatures).
There has to be a way to lower the fan speed on Fedora but I can’t find it. I tried fancontrol from lm_sensors but it complains about not being able to manually set the fans and there’s nothing I can see in the BIOS that’s even remotely relevant.
Am I doomed to a noisy Fedora box? Or is there a way I can make this thing quieter short of buying new fans? (The latter is an option I suppose, but if Win7 can run perfectly silent, then I’m of the frame of mind that Fedora should too). Running an up to date F13 (wheeee!!). Thanks for any suggestions.
May 23, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Set up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux server which takes you through the necessary steps of setting up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux box. I use Dropbox here for keeping certain files in sync between systems, but I also am connected to a secondary Dropbox to act as a remote backup for a long-standing client of mine. It works great; they have two systems that share data (encrypted disk images), and I’ve also had to run a second copy of Dropbox on my system here to keep a copy of that data, but I was then rsyncing it to my remote backup server as well. With this, I can skip my system at home as being the “middle man” and get that remote backup server (headless CentOS 5) linked to the Dropbox instead. Saves bandwidth and headaches.
For anyone who uses runit, the following is a script to supervise dropboxd as a specific user. With runit I can connect to as many independent Dropbox accounts as I like, running each under a specific user.
#!/bin/execlineb
# $Id: run 849 2009-04-19 21:33:01Z vdanen $
/bin/fdmove -c 2 1
/bin/export PATH "/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin"
/bin/export HOME "/home/vdanen"
/bin/cd /home/vdanen/.dropbox-dist
/sbin/chpst -u vdanen /home/vdanen/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
Read the tip for how to get it all setup.
May 15, 2010
This week’s techmail was Firewall configuration with system-config-firewall which discusses the niceties of using Fedora’s system-config-firewall to configure iptables. I’m not much of a GUI guy, but the interface for the firewall configuration is really slick. Will it replace my use of editing iptables rules in /etc/sysconfig/iptables? Probably not. But if you were afraid of editing a text file to setup your firewall rules, then using system-config-firewall will be welcome for you.
May 7, 2010
This week’s techmail was Managing MySQL with MySQL Workbench. I’ve always been a CLI guy when it comes to MySQL (as with most things: mutt, irssi, etc.), and when I needed something GUIrific I went with phpMyAdmin. However, I’ve looked at MySQL Workbench and I like what I’m seeing. The tip discusses what makes make MySQL Workbench appealing for me.
April 29, 2010
This week’s techmail is Work on remote Subversion repositories locally with Git which talks about using Git locally to interface with a remote (or local, even) subversion repository. Involved in a project that uses Subversion as their version control system, but prefer to use Git? No problem. The svn-git plugin can make it seamless to work with a Subversion repository while you use Git locally. It works really slick, and is definitely well worth it for people who prefer Git but have to make use of a Subversion repository.
April 21, 2010
This week’s techmail is System monitoring with Zenoss takes complexity out of configuration (not quite sure why my original title got changed, as this one doesn’t make much sense to me, but ok…). Anyways, I’ve been a long-time fan of Nagios, still use it, but I’m seriously considering replacing it with Zenoss. I need to spend a bit more time fiddling with it, but (as the techmail indicates) it’s quite promising and looks very feature rich. And not nearly as complicated to configure as Nagios. Always boils down to time though… need to find some time to dedicate to figuring Zenoss out more to make it as useful to me as Nagios currently is, and to make it a replacement tool.
