I often need VMs set up locally for development purposes. Setting these up manually can be time-consuming and error-prone, so I use Ansible to almost entirely automate the process.

[Aside: This post assumes you know how to use Ansible, and also doesn’t go into a tonne of detail on …

It’s long struck me as peculiar that package management isn’t more commonly built on top of union filesystems. I’m sure there’s probably somebody who’s had roughly similar ideas to the ones I’m about to put forward, but I’ve never came across them being …

I hardly ever have to do this, so I can never remember precisely how to do it. Hopefully by noting it here, I won’t forget again.

Specifically, I want to do this so that I can create a single DVD image from the FreeBSD 6.3 CD images I …

Some day, if you’re a software developer and develop software than runs on Linux, you will end up, whether you like it or not, having to build an RPM file.

I’ve just spent an absolutely inordinate amount of time working out how to do this. It wasn’t …