Lately I've been cumulating a very large list of things I need to do. It's been getting harder and harder to keep track of what I need to do. If I make a nice simple text file and a command to open up vim with my notes then I wind up adding notes but never checking them. That helps but it's not enough. There's a lot of really heavy note taking options out there. You could make your home page go to Google Notebook. That's definitely not light weight.

What is Et cetera?...

Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: et·cet·era
Pronunciation: \et-ˈse-tə-rə, -ˈse-trə also it-, ÷ek-, ÷ik-\
Function: noun
Date: 1597

1 : a number of unspecified additional persons or things
2 plural : unspecified additional items : odds and ends

Let's think about that. /etc/ is full of random junk. It's pretty much the configuration for your whole system. Where do you configure defaults for the xxxx app? Did you check in /etc/? It's probably there.

warning: no proof reading and some rambling...

I recently made the change to Nginx from Apache. This change came with a severe lack of fun and enjoyment. The whole process was >150 hours. Painstaking. It should be pretty easy to move this to my production server, probably be much much easier. I have yet to even touch using it as a proxy.

As a preliminary note: DO NOT follow anything in this and proceed to ask for help. If you follow this than consider yourself void of ANY support. Especially from the -kernel channel. They support and develop stock kernels, not your personal modifications.

Now.. In my quest for a fast boot time into a fully functional system that is very light weight, I tried out Gentoo. After using Gentoo I discovered that they're not that "ricer" community everyone claims they are. In many way's they're the exact opposite. Sure some of them fall into the ricer category but they're not very common.

I know this concept sound simple. You SSH into a server and restore a screen session running irssi. However, I wouldn't be writing about it if I didn't have a way to make it more efficient.

I'll explain the benefits as we go along.

First we need to get you into your server. I suggest setting up a shared key between you and your server. There's plenty of guides out there about shared keys.
ssh server.com

Once in your server you need to install irssi and screen.
sudo aptitude install irssi screen

Irssi has a fairly nice proxy feature. It's probably the best proxy I've ever used. Unfortunately, it has a few flaws and is very under documented.

I gave up on ever having a decent proxy and switched to the screen option but I still want to explain this feature so it's decently documented somewhere.

To setup the server you need to first install irssi and screen. Edit your configuration the same as you normally would to connect to any other server.

You want to proxy to load my default so edit ~/.irssi/startup and add the line "/LOAD PROXY".

You ever been trying to connect to a server using SSH and it takes years to connect? Maybe not years, but hours.

Yup, I've waited over an hour before just to make an SSH connection to a server.

I've never been able to figure it out until now. The issue was because of my hosts file. My server had been running on two IP's. It still is, and is still capable of utilizing both. However, I needed to give one card specific control to handle most all of the network requests.

I think I achieved nearly the perfect Irssi + OpenBox.

There's four steps to my setup. Configuring gnome-terminal, alltray, irssi, and an image.

First of all, we need to set up irssi. If your'e reading this, I'm guessing you've already done this. I use murf. You can find themes at http://irssi.org/themes. Download one, place it in ~/.irssi/ and execute /theme inside of irssi. You can do /save to save these settings.

What an interesting question... Why not use all the RAM and HD space you have as long as it doesn't affect performance? It's one that's been nagging at me a lot lately.

I've seen an 8.10 64bit Live CD running on a dual monitor setup and I've seen it do so VERY beautifully. Everything except sound worked right out of the box. If I had a desktop system like that, I'd be running it that same way. It was fast, responsive, pretty, everything.