Generating and distributing entropy with the OneRNG HWRNG USB in various virtualisation environments

Part of the provisioning process for the VPS host in which this Ghost blog platform runs atop involved the generation of a 4096-bit GPG key pair. Exporting, transferring, importing, and ultimately signing the GPG public keys between my laptop and »

Migrating LVM thin {pools,volumes,snapshots} to a software RAID environment

As part of Octeron's (my VM server) migration from Debian "Wheezy" 7.9 to Debian "Jessie" 8.2 I analysed and refined my typical VM lifecycle workflow (i.e. creation/importing/cloning, usage, snapshot(s), exporting, deletion) in an effort »

Administering a Serial-over-LAN (RMCP+) based installation of Debian Jessie entirely through console

The recent addition of four 16GB DDR3 DIMM modules to my VM server (Octeron) has seen its RAM capacity double from 64GB to 128GB thus facilitating the creation of even bigger virtualised environments. Subsequent testing of the new RAM modules »

Installing Debian Jessie on a Dell XPS 13 9350 via a custom Debian Installer ISO with complete hardware support

Since its initial announcement at CES back in January 2015 I've kept a close eye on the progression of the venerable Dell XPS 13 9343 Ultrabook. The 9343's evolutionary successor, the "9350", was released later that year and boasted various »

Configuring Unprivileged LXC containers in Debian Jessie

The gradual maturity of Linux Control Groups and in-kernel namespaces (i.e. net, user, mount, IPC, etc) has enabled powerful OS-level virtualisation utilities such as Docker and LXC to offer a lightweight, high-performing alternative to typical hardware based virtualisation (e. »

Debootstrap a standalone Debian system across multiple partitions

Having finally finished my MSci Computer Science course at Loughborough University (hoorah!) I am now exploring plausible migration options to move my Debian Wheezy 7.8 root Debian 7.8 installation from my Samsung 840 250GB to my new Samsung »

Automating external storage backups with udisks-glue

The amount of administration time saved with effective automation can be quite staggering when calculated over several months. A well developed automation script/program can greatly reduce errors (typically introduced by human interaction), be ran at specified times throughout the »