It looked as if it could not propagate an environment variable pointing to the location of the file with my VMs settings to the VirtualBox command-line interface, so the latter kept looking for it in the system profile directory. Worked around by copying the file there; now have a small Ubuntu server running quietly in the background.

In some circumstances, you may need to find out why certain messages are not being marked as spam by SpamAssassin (or, for that matter, any other junk mail filtering solution). I had such a need today and it turned out to be less trivial that I had expected.

Learn how to set up a local repository for .deb packages you’ve built or downloaded, and deploy it to production servers with minimal interference. PHP 5.3.3 packages backported to Ubuntu 10.04 are used as an example.

Inspired by my desire to run PHP-FPM on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, this post describes the available options and provides step-by-step backporting instructions for PHP 5.3.3 included in Ubuntu 10.10.

Presented in this post is a process optimized for the creation of multiple, nearly identical VirtualBox VM clones that may then run side-by-side on a single host.

However lean and streamlined have operating system installation procedures become in recent years, it is always desirable to reduce the amounts of time and user interaction required, especially when you need to conduct a series of (nearly) identical installations. Virtual machine cloning comes to the rescue. This post show how to install a baseline Ubuntu Server on a VirtualBox VM for subsequent cloning.

When you install Ubuntu on a virtual machine, you may notice that the console redraws very slowly, if it was a 300 baud terminal. This post describes solutions to this problem that worked well for me when installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on VirtualBox.