About me

My name is Rich Jerrido and I am the person behind www.outsidaz.org I am a geek hailing from the city of brotherly love. I started this blog a couple of years back as a dumping place for a lot of working knowledge of mine that I could have available online regardless of where I was. Over time it has evolved into being a full-fledged blog, complete with RSS feeds, comments, and pictures.When I am not hacking on computers for profit, I hack on them for fun.Read more about me »

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Archive for the ‘Linux – CentOS’ Category


How to leverage cloud computing assets via apache-libcloud

Monday, December 13th, 2010

They say that necessity is the mother of all invention. I would like to go on record as saying that if that is true, then laziness must be his father. Frequently, I have a requirement to spin up a machine or two (or a hundred) in “the cloud” to play around with, test something out, [...]

Ext4, extent allocation, and why we need e4defrag now!

Friday, November 27th, 2009

I have been on a mission to convert many of my older filesystems from Ext3 to Ext4 in order to get many of the advanced features. One of the biggest features that is on my “must-have” list are extents, which allow much better large file performance as well as making it harder to fragment an [...]

Identifying failed drives via udev and mdadm

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Given the fact that many of my systems use software RAID and are packed chock full of drives, one of my biggest pain points is that on a drive failure, I have only limited information available to identify which drive failed. So when I go to replace a drive, it is sometimes a guessing game [...]

Hard Drive Upgrades with the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM)

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

Disk Management is one of those areas that Linux just gets right, especially with the Logical Volume Manager. The ability to separate the volumes that we format & mount (LV’s) from the disks we install (PV’s) is completely worth the cost of admission alone. That layer of abstraction has other tangibles, such as the ability [...]

Building HandBrake 0.9.3 for CentOS/RHEL5

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Stemming from my need to have my virtualization system do its fair share of work with regards to encoding digital media arose my need to run HandBrake on a RHEL5 system. These instructions were tested and validated on both a CentOS5.4 installation on i386 and x86_64 architectures and are a gratuitous pillaging of (this) post.