This is a brain dump of my task list when bringing up a new server. (For my purposes, a linode running some version of Ubuntu.)

1. Create a user account.
   1. Add user to wheel.
   2. Set up sudo for wheel.
   3. Set up ssh authorized-ids.
   4. Change shell to zsh.
   5. Copy dot-files.
2. SSH config ...

A python-based project I'm working on has a win32 user that I need to support. Until yesterday I've been moving to a win32 laptop in order to run python setup.py bdist_wininst so I can produce a self-installing executable. Then I discovered how trivial it is to use ...

It's a hassle to have to switch from emacs to the shell, run unit tests, pick out the failure, switch back to emacs, navigate to the line, forget where you were supposed to go, switch back, etc etc.

The whole process is much easier with compilation-perl.el. This handy ...

Since my [former] company's product is based on ubuntu, we use apt to distribute upgrades. We don't normally want customers to pull upgrades from the upstream distribution, so we've pruned back the main /etc/apt/sources.list to include just our server. We rename the original default ...

ISC's dhcpd uses this code to check for an already-running daemon:

/* Read previous pid file. */
if ((i = open (path_dhcpd_pid, O_RDONLY)) >= 0) {
    status = read (i, pbuf, (sizeof pbuf) - 1);
    close (i);
    if (status > 0) {
        pbuf [status] = 0;
        pid = atoi (pbuf);        /* If the previous server process is not still running,
           write ...