Humboldt Solutions Ltd

When an application writes a file, the data does not become permanent immediately. The write operation first moves the data into the operating system cache in RAM, where it is vulnerable to system crashes and loss of power. The second step is the transfer to the hard disk, which normally has write caching enabled. [...]

Linux machines with multiple network interfaces are unreliable as TFTP servers. This issue has been outstanding for a long time, without any resolution. The patch attached to the Debian bug fixes the problem for an old release of tftpd-hpa, but does not apply cleanly to recent releases.
Recent releases of dnsmasq contain a TFTP server which [...]

Every so often I see someone attempting to run the Linux kernel on a PCI add-in card. I’ve done this myself, but there are a lot of complications. This article covers the hardware, and a second article will cover software. Don’t take this as chipset selection advice: before you commit to hardware double-check both the [...]

I have now seen my first ever year 2038 bug. An embedded Linux system that was installed two years ago became unable to acquire a network address by DHCP. The machine did not require an accurate clock, and nobody had initialised its battery-backed real-time clock. Once installed, it had started counting forward from 1st [...]

After several years of use, the server for my development machines developed a problem. If I rebooted the machine without an internet connection, it would pause for several minutes while starting the NFS service.
The Linux NFS server keeps track of status in several files. Whenever a client mounts a filesystem, the server records this in [...]