Since we began benchmarking Btrfs a few months ago we have found it to not deliver any spectacular file-system performance results on Linux. Committed to the Linux 2.6.31 kernel was Btrfs v0.19. Does this release bring any performance improvements? Yes and no.

One of the topics of ongoing interest in the kernel community is that of maintaining quality. It is trivially obvious that we need to maintain and even improve quality. It is less obvious how best to do so. One broad approach that has found some real success is to increase the visibility of various aspects of the kernel.

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy and heartbeat on Debian Lenny. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content.

Curious about programming, but having trouble getting started because you're confused about all those languages? This article will give you an overview of the most common desktop languages you'll see in free software today.

Here are 10 simple tricks for APT, the Advanced Packaging Tool used on Debian and Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu.

CMus (C* Music Player) is an ncurses-based audio player which can be run in a shell, with no need for an X server which is very configurable with Vi-like commands, multiple views and keyboard shortcuts. It supports various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, AAC or WMA.

Many options exist for setting up clustered and highly available storage, but figuring out what each does will take a bit of research. Your choice of storage architecture as well as file system is crucial, as most have severe limitations that require careful design workarounds.

A posting on the Web Hosting Talk forum is feeding speculation about a critical security vulnerability in the OpenSSH server in CentOS/Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).