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How to determine the mount point for a device on Linux

While reinstalling a server and moving it to Debian, I ran into the problem that I need to sync the EFI partitions. The system is using a RAID on two disks, but the EFI partitions can't be a RAID and need to exist on both disks. Or rather it is useful to have the EFI partition on every disk: if one disk fails, the system can boot from the other disk. grub only installs the necessary files on one partition. However one can use a script as grub hook, and sync all partitions. This script needs to determine if a device is already mounted somewhere, or needs to be mounted. Turns out there is a little and not well-known tool for this.

Web service for Dynamic DNS service

Last in my small series about running your own Dynamic DNS service: how to support clients which can’t use the nsupdate tool directly.


What is my IP address?

For a number of reasons it is nice to know your own IP-address. If you are behind a firewall or a NAT system, you usually only have a private IP-address and “someone else” on the internet needs to tell you your official IP-address.


Run your own Dynamic DNS server

Dyn, the company behind the widely known dynamic DNS service DynDNS, will shut down it’s free service effectively May 7th, 2014. Of course there are plenty of other free or freemium services out there, but history will repeat itself and these services will vanish over time, or change their business modell.

A while ago I spent an afternoon to implement my own dynamic DNS service.


Cleanup and reuse unused Copy&Paste disk space occupied by VMware

Whenever you Copy&Paste (or Cut&Paste) something into or from a VMware instance, the software first copies the files into a temporary directory and later on sends the copy/move job to Windows. Since the Windows task is asynchronous, VMware has no chance to find out when this actually finishes - so it is supposed to clean up this temporary directory at boot time.

However, waiting for the next reboot can clog up quite some disk space (when I develop something I often have to copy many files around between several virtual machines and the desktop) - despite that Windows still likes to BSoD on me from time to time. And sometimes VMware does not get the cleanup right at reboot and the files are still there.


New screen_away release

The new release (0.9.7) is already submitted and some days old, but not yet published on the irssi scripts website :-(