Thinkhole Labs

I recently switched my home file server from Gentoo to Ubuntu and noticed that, by default, Ubuntu uses UUIDs to identify hard drives in /etc/fstab.

That’s cool, because I’ve had some issues in the past with USB drives grabbing different device names than I expected. Using a truly unique identifier (or at least one that’s unlikely to be duplicated) such as a UUID helps out with that.

So how do you find the UUID of a device? Easy! You can either use:

root@europa:/root# blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="3f467d1c-12bd-459e-be63-20e313faad88" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda5: TYPE="swap" UUID="cfe7d582-aa62-469b-8f4f-40927d013748"
/dev/sdb1: UUID="da488135-3744-487e-89e2-4898653db209" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="d438941d-e928-4ec1-9b96-eead147cd23e" TYPE="ext3"

Or if you need to find the UUID of a specific device, you can use this:

root@europa:/root# vol_id -u /dev/sdc1
d438941d-e928-4ec1-9b96-eead147cd23e

Copy and paste the UUID into /etc/fstab, add your mounting options, and you’re done.

Here’s a really roundabout way of finding the Fibonacci numbers less than 100:

Basically if x1 or x2 have an odd number of factors, then z is a Fibonacci number. If they have an even number of factors, it’s not. Math is awesome. :)

Yep. Decided the blog needed a new theme. Went with Mainstream from WooThemes with a few tiny modifications.

Just 22 days left until the 2nd annual Central PA Open Source Conference, but there is still time to register! Tickets are only $34.99 and give you access to all three conference tracks (21 speakers), breakfast, and lunch. Pretty good deal for a fun day. It’s also a great way to network with people, which is never a bad thing in a tight economy. :)

You can register at cposc.eventbrite.com and check out all the details at www.cposc.org.

Hope to see you in October!

We’ll be running another Central PA Open Source Conference (CPOSC) this year!

CPOSC is a small, low-cost, one-day conference about all things Open Source. This year it will be on Saturday, October 17, 2009 in Harrisburg.

The Call for Participation is now open and we are looking for speakers. If you or someone you know would be interested in speaking, please encourage them to send in a talk proposal.

Details about the conference can be found at cposc.org and there’s also a Speaker FAQ with more details. The deadline to submit talk proposals is July 10, 2009.

Please spread the word, and hopefully we’ll see you in October!