If you want to run sudo from any part of a cron job make sure you comment out the “Defaults requiretty” from /etc/sudoers. Bit me twice now so hopefully I’ll remember next time. Ed: Apologies to those who have read this before but I had to restore from backup and my last post wasn’t in [...]

A few things all of us are probably interested in: SSD Write Amplification: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2329594,00.asp Journaling and write performance in ext4: http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/01/ssds-journaling-and-noatimerelatime/ The bottom-line as far as wear and tear: vfat is basically the same as a journaled FS from a wear-leveling standpoint, both are worst case. Thankfully vfat, being the worst case, forced the manufacturers [...]

The past few days people in Linux blogosphere have been bringing back up the noatime/nodiratime mount options. These options disable the updating of file and directory access times. On many standard systems when you read file a “last read,” or access time, timestamp is written to disk. Disabling the writing of access times can provide [...]