Today I was having some troubles. I was trying to unmount a drive on my Linux server but I kept getting the

umount: /mnt/data: device is busy

message back. Well this means that some process is using a file on that drive. fuser to the rescue. I’ll take you through the steps I used to unlock this drive below.

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about Synergy. Synergy is a free (as in beer and speech) piece of software that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse with multiple computers. This differs from a traditional KVM in a couple ways. 1. You get the added screen real estate as each machine needs their own screen 2. You don’t need additional hardware the keyboard/mouse switching is done over your existing network. The advantage of this is that Synergy is cross platform, there are currently Synergy clients for OS X, Linux and Windows (No official support for Vista however, It may be possible but your mileage may vary. let me know how you make out if you try it) so you can have a Windows XP machine on the left monitor an Apple machine on the center monitor and a Linux machine on the right monitor or you could have 3 machines all with the same OS.

Have you ever needed to SSH into a firewalled computer where you don’t have control over the firewall? Well by creating a tunnel from your this protected machine to your machine at home you can punch a tiny SSH sized hole in that firewall.