The ongoing struggle

I originally wrote this article as a lengthy email to HantsLUG, but then decided it was worth putting on the wiki.

Boost your Vim editing productivity: Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing

I keep being asked about, or witnessing discussions of, how best to do RAID on Linux. I have a few recommendations I always make but I’m not off the top of my head able to name good sites to back them up. So, I’m currently writing an article on the wiki about Linux RAID best [...]

The last two days I’ve been getting the following breakage email from the daily updates script on one of my etch Xen domains:
/etc/cron.daily/local-apt:
W: GPG error: http://admin.curacao.strugglers.net etch
Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified
because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY
010908312D230C5F
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
On further investigaton it [...]

Do initrds have any use at all apart from:

Distribution kernels where the packager has no idea what hardware the kernel will need to run on
Kernels intended to work on a large variety of machines without modification (really just another variant of the above use)
Unusual setups like running your root filesystem inside a filesystem that needs [...]