Holy freakin' mackeral, I've just discovered SSHFS (pathetic of me, I know), and this thing is awesomely cool! Most of you know that you can mount Samba-shared drives using smbfs. In other words, you enable Samba on a machine, share a directory, and then go to another machine & mount that shared directory via smbfs, which makes it appear as though that remote directory is actually directly connected to your machine. Pretty freaking cool, except that (a) you have to have Samba set up, which can be a PITA, and (b) you can't share drives over the Net. But don't despair - now there's a better way. Using SSHFS, if you can ssh into machine BAR from machine FOO, you can mount a directory that's located on BAR and then access it on FOO, as though it was directly connected to FOO. It's super easy to do it - much easier than with Samba - and better still, everything is encrypted! To add icing on the cake, you can set things up in fstab to make the whole process more automated, if you so desire. ...

Well, I just spent a few frustrating hours the other night, & I wanted to help prevent the same from happening to any of you. I was trying to use SMBFS to mount a Samba share, & it just wasn't working. Samba was set up on Chaucer (whose IP is 192.168.0.25), & I was sharing the music directory, & I could connect via smbclient, so I thought everything was good. I tried mounting with this line: smbmount //192.168.0.25/music /home/scott/chaucer_music/ -o credentials=/home/scott/credentials,fmask=644,dmask=755, uid=1000,gid=1000,workgroup=HOME Seemed to work just fine. But Konqueror wouldn't display the contents of /home/scott, & just showed a blank screen (!), while ls ~/ on the CLI finally, after a minute or so, gave me this error message: ls: chaucer_music: Input/output error The only solution was to unmount the share: sudo umount /home/scott/chaucer_data Unfortunately, sometimes that didn't even work, & I had to pull out the big guns (normally, this is ...

Cygwin, for those of you who don't know, is basically a Linux environment that runs in Windows. Want a real Linux shell that you can run in Windows, instead of the crappy, anemic Windows Command Line? Then you need Cygwin. You can even run X & GUIs, but it's kinda slow unless you're using a monster machine. Me, I just like having a real CLI when I have to use Winders. If you're looking for info that'll help you run Cygwin effectively (& since it's on top of Windows, there are a few gotchas you'd better know about, like this one: Cygwin will automatically default to an imaginary mount point under the default POSIX path /cygdrive. For example, if Cygwin accesses Z:\foo and the Z drive is not currently in the mount table, then Z:\ would be automatically converted to /cygdrive/Z. Man, that drove me nuts when I first started using Cygwin: how the %#$^&@ do I get to the D drive? Now we both know. If you want to learn that & other essentials, check out the ...

When it comes to Linux filesystems, there are a lot of great choices: EXT3 & ReiserFS leap immediately to mind, as they're both journaled, stable, & widely supported. But they're not so good when it comes to sharing data with Windows & Mac OS. There is one format that's widely supported on all the major platforms for both reading & writing, however: VFAT, or FAT32. It's not journaled, it's not the best for storing massive amounts of data, and it's not the most efficient in the world, but it is readable - and, more importantly, writable - by virtually everything. Heck, my beloved iRiver H320 uses VFAT, so I can mount it on virtually every machine I use. If you want to learn more about VFAT (and really, who doesn't?), read OSNews "The vfat file system and Linux". It's a translation of a German article, and in this the effort made to perform the translation was definitely worth it. You'll learn something, I guarantee. Especially read the section titled "Problems with large vfat ...

The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to you in one easy-to-read weekly post. You'll find links to the hottest posts from the third week of July after the jump. Enjoy! ...

The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to you in one easy-to-read weekly post. You'll find links to the hottest posts from the past week after the jump including a special review contest, celebrity virginity, and even the best Windows emulator for Mac. Enjoy! ...

Mail from Theo to the list this morning: From: Theo de Raadt To: announce@cvs.openbsd.org Date: Nov 1, 2005 1:30 AM Subject: OpenBSD 3.8 released November 1, 2005 Go and get it!  (Please remember to check the primary mirrors please — thanks) OpenBSD 3.8 RELEASED Nov 1, 2005. We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 3.8. This is our 18th release on CD-ROM (and 19th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of eight years with only a single remote hole in the default install. As in our previous releases, 3.8 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system: ...