SmartPCI56(UCB1500) 56K Modem with Slackware

I got another Modem PCI card - again. This time something like this:

# lspci
...
00:09.0 Modem: Philips Semiconductors SmartPCI56(UCB1500) 56K Modem (rev 01)
...

PCTel Inc HSP MicroModem 56 with Slackware

Yesterday I got an old PCI Modem card, something with pctel anything. I was wondering if I could get it to run, so I did some research on the Internet and found the pctel software for Linux. The disapointment was that i will only compile on 32bit machines. Anyway, I setup my old Athlon 800MHz desktop with the pctel card and installed the current Slackware release (13.37). Then I donwloaded the driver from http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/pctel-linux/welcome.html:

LDAP for Slackware Linux

When you work with Slackware Linux and try to authenticate with LDAP then you will figure out that it won't work. This has a simple reason: to authenticate with LDAP you need PAM, but Patrick Volkerding refuses to put PAM into Slackware because of security reason - AFAIK. Here is a small description how to setup Slackware for authentication with LDAP. But be aware: I am doing some things here that you shouldn't do under normal circumstances.

Available disk space in Linux

One of the basic tools to monitor your harddisks and partitions is df - disk free. It shows you a couple of information about how your harddisk is used. A sample output maybe like this:

# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root            251915124  33553292 205565260  15% /
...

Available, used and free memory in Linux

free will show the used and available memory. The default output could be like this:

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3792504    1499452    2293052          0      48460     586436
-/+ buffers/cache:     864556    2927948
Swap:      4200992          0    4200992

Configuring network and SSH in NetBSD

I have set up my old workstation (AMD Duron with 1.2GHz and 512MB of Ram) with the current NetBSD release 5.1 to play a little around with it. I installed it in a VM (without any networking hardware) directly on the harddisk and after installation I placed the harddisk into the computer. When the OS is booted, I took a look at the networking hardware: 

Available, used and free memory in Solaris

To get the amount of memory installed use prtdiag:

# prtconf | grep Memory
Memory size: 16384 Megabytes
...

Reusing/relabeling media with bacula

A few weeks ago I reinstalled my backup server with bacula. I have a small machine (2x700MHz, 1GB, Solaris 10, Bacula 5.0.3) with 3 DDS-3 tape drives (and other stuff to play around). Now I want to reuse my old tapes which were already labeled. So I have to do some kind of relabeling. When I try to normally label the prior used tapes I get the following error: 

Creating mp4 for Android with ffmpeg

I am traveling to work by public transportation and I thought it would be a cool idea to have some movies with me during the train ride. Of course I have to encode them first. Here is a way to do this with ffmpeg:

Mirroring an existing and encrypted disk with mdadm

I have all my data (personal, music etc.) stored on one 1.5TB disk and to avoid manual backups to external devices I want (need) to create a mirror. The disk itself is encrypted and formatted with ext3. The big picture is like this: