Sometimes with Gentoo you’ll run across some weird ‘blocker’ issues. Meaning that certain older packages/libraries/etc are blocked in order to do the update. Sometimes these are super easy to fix, usually by unmerging the blocked packages and emerging the new update package. Sometimes, it’s a pain. The e2fsprogs and e2fsprogs-lib blocker problem is an example… Continue reading Quick fix for e2fsprogs, com_err, and ss blockers

Over the last couple of years, I had two cisco/linksys gigabit switches die on me. I’ve been around networking and computers for a long, long time, and I’ve never seen switches go out. They’ve always been rock solid and always reliable. I have seen a switch port go out, but that’s about it. About two… Continue reading Dell PowerConnect 2708/2716 Gigabit Switches

Working on a server with a different timezone that my current location, I ran into a problem when a date check was causing problems with users in my zone. I needed to update timezone within the query to handle this problem. I quickly found the CONVERT_TZ() function in MySQL, but during my tests I would… Continue reading Updating MySQL’s timezone table