I hesitate to select flashrom because it is a program that should be used with the utmost caution and because it doesn’t yet work as well as I would like. However, it shows great promise and offers functionality that is currently lacking in Linux. Quite simply it is an open source application that allows the user to flash their BIOS from Linux. Usually, to flash the BIOS of a machine I tend to use a boot cd to load a DOS environment from which I can run the BIOS update utility. With flashrom I can flash the system BIOS from Linux and reboot at my leisure.

I’ve advocated the use of cssh before so I thought I would add a quick tip on how to make it more visually appealing. On my Ubuntu 7.10 system the default colors where black text on a white background which I find much more difficult to use than the reverse. It took a bit of research and digging into the man page for xterm to find a good solution.

I’ve been experiencing some issues with regard to backing up my Xen user domains. As I investigated the issues I once again found the lack of documentation to be frustrating, especially about such a fundamentally important issue as backups. There is simply no documentation on how to setup enterprise level backups for Xen. So here on some thoughts on what I see as the state of things, and where they could go form here to get better.

I’ve had MySQL database corruption from time to time, usually on a system that either experiences a power failure or kernel panic. The process is not difficult but I always find myself relearning how to do it each time. The program mysqlcheck comes in handy to check for errors and repair them.

A number of security vulnerabilities have been patched in the Ubuntu kernels. Several of the patches fixed situations where a malicious user could cause a kernel panic. I’ve run the update on a few systems without any issues so I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t upgraded yet to do so. More details on the specifics of the fixes can be found in USN-558-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities.