When creating command-line applications, the user is usually present at the terminal to provide commands to the application and read its output. This is called interactive mode. But sometimes, you want to start a long-running program in the background, so it runs while you're not present. This is called daemon mode, and the programs themselves are usually called daemons. Daemons? In contrast to their mythical counterpart, daemons under Unix are usually much more benign....

So I've just returned from a week long vacation to sunny Kos Island in Greece. As I lay beside the swimming pools of the resort I was staying, I found that I had loaded two particular books onto my Kindle. These books were “ The C Programming Language” by Kernigan and Ritchie, and “ Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment” by Stevens and Rago. As a long time Linux user and programmer, I have always been intrigued by the C programming language....

Part two in the series about Cyso's DevOps related projects, focusing on automatic deployment of machines. Part one is here. The article is in Dutch, because this post has also been posted to Cyso's blog. Waar waren we gebleven In het vorige deel heb ik de concepten achter mijn visie over Automated Deployment uitgelegd. Kortgezegd zijn er drie stappen: aanmaken, installeren en configureren. Afhankelijk van het doel van de uiteindelijk beoogde machine kan voor elke stap de beste tool gekozen worden....

Debian packaging is something that is both simple and elegant, and hard to get into. There is a huge amount of information about it available online, a lot of it on Debian's own wiki. Ubuntu, being a Debian derivative, also uses Debian packaging. Their Launchpad website offers automatic building of packages, and providing a so called PPA, which is a personal Apt repository. So, Debian provides the techniques, and Ubuntu provides an easy platform to host packages....

I have created a blog post about what I've been doing the last couple of months at Cyso. Recently I've been able to stop focusing on development, and start doing more DevOps related projects. Two of these were quite successful internally, so I have taken the time to document it in the form of blog posts. Below is the first of probably three blog posts, focusing on automatic deployment of machines....