I am using Linux (Fedora Core 6) on a pretty high end hardware (at least when I bought it) - Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz (4M shared L2 Cache) with 2 GB DDR2 RAM, nVidia dual-head graphics card for over a year now. And yet a simple change made it at least 20-40% faster. Even my firefox (with 100+ tabs always open) feels much faster. So what is this magic change?

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How to overwrite your hard disk with random characters
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Have you seen the error while installing a package using yum / yumex?

Error: vlc conflicts with faad2 >= 2.5
Error: Missing Dependency: faad2 < 2.5 is needed by package ffmpeg-libs

The error is because of using freshrpms repository or other repository to install recent version of faad2. Now let’s see how you can solve it.

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In Linux you can use the dd command to copy MBR from one hard disk to another. You can also use dd to backup your master boot record to a different (or same) media. One of the common use of MBR copying is to ensure transparent fail-over in RAID-1 hard-disk array, should one hard-disks fail. Read more for examples.

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A simple tip for newbies - how to get Java stack trace, the invaluable tool to debug java programs, in Linux:
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Please read the original article - How To: Load Balancing & Failover With Dual/ Multi WAN / ADSL / Cable Connections on Linux. It contains detailed information with a sample script. Viliam Kočinský modified my script to send email when routing table changes. Also he is starting the script as a service from /etc/init.d. Read below for his enhancements:

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Use the command below as root after replacing new-login-name and old-login-name appropriately:
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That’s about the best you can say about the 8 Mbps plans from Airtel. The starter Combo 1299 plan provides 8 mbps @ only Rs. 1299 per month. If you think that is good, think again. There is a big catch.

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Our local setup consists of a single ntp server which synchronizes time from asia pool of ntp.org ([0-2].asia.pool.ntp.org) and several ntp servers in the intranet which synchronizes from the above server. This setup ensures identical clock on all the machines on the intranet as well as reduces load on ntp.org servers. However we faced with an infuriating problem in getting the clients to sysnchronize with the local server. In some machines we would get this error message in log ( /var/log/messages )during startup:
“ntpdate[4933]: no server suitable for synchronization found”

Restarting ntpd would give this error message:

[root@jaguar ntp]# /sbin/service ntpd start
ntpd: Synchronizing with time server:            [FAILED]
Starting ntpd:                                   [  OK  ]

The second problem was that ntp server was taking a long time to come up (with failure message as described above) thereby slowing down booting time. After much investigation and tinkering (not to mention futile searches with Google), I accidentally came across a simple solution.
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Cross-browser and cross-platform testing is a bane as well as a requirement for web applications. Consider Internet Explorer on Windows. There are two major version 6 & 7, not to mention still used 5.5. You need to either use different machines or multi-boot machines or use hacks to run them simultaneously or virtualization software like VMWare; not of them are really easy to setup and use for common web developer. Then you have Opera & Firefox (we develop in Firefox so it gets tested first in our case). Did I mention testing on Mac with Safari, Firefox and other browsers? Oh, and don’t forget Linux too. Are you feeling overwhelmed? Let’s see how you can solve most of these problems.

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