Understanding the Raft Consensus Protocol

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The Raft consensus protocol is a distributed consensus algorithm designed to be more understandable than other consensus algorithms like Paxos. It ensures that a cluster of servers can agree on the state of a system even in the presence of failures. Key Concepts Raft divides the consensus problem into three relatively independent subproblems: Leader Election:
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Printing Google Doc with Comments in Page Margins

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Google Doc documents support comments which is useful for collaborative editing of files with comments to each others. But when we print the document from Google Doc, the comments are not included. How to print the document with comments in page margins? In this post, we will introduce a method using the opensource and free
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Linux Kernel: Add support for using a MAX3421E chip as a host driver

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This change “Add support for using a MAX3421E chip as a host driver.” (commit 2d53139) in Linux kernel is authored by David Mosberger <davidm [at] egauge.net> on Mon Apr 28 22:14:07 2014 -0600. Description of “Add support for using a MAX3421E chip as a host driver.” The change “Add support for using a MAX3421E chip
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Printing Comments in Page Margins in LibreOffice

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“Comments” and “tracking changes” are nice features of the opensource LibreOffice software (and other Office software) to add comments and track changes in documents. OpenDocument ODT and MS Word DOCX/DOC file formats all support comments and change trackings. When we print the documents, how to print the comments in the page margins too in LibreOffice?
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Installing R and RStudio Server in Ubuntu Linux

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R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics, providing a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques. The R environment is open source software under GPL. R has rich software packages and is widely used for statistical analysis. RStudio Server is an R integrated development environment (IDE) that provides many useful features
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Bash Learning Materials

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Bash (GNU Bourne-Again SHell) the default shell for many Linux distributions. It is very common for scripting languages in Linux. Bash is easy and straightforward for writing small tools. However, as most tools, it has its grammars that could easily cause bugs if they are not used correctly. Here I summarize a list of good
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How to mirror a website using wget on Linux?

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How to mirror a website using wget on Linux? If the command can filter only specific file extensions, such as pdf and docx, it will be much better too. To download all PDF files from https://example.org/path/ as an example, you may use this command: wget –mirror \ –convert-links –no-parent –quiet \ –adjust-extension -A pdf \
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Thunderbird Addons to Make Thunderbird Easier to Use

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Thunderbird is powerful and feature rich. But different users have different needs and it is not feasible to include all features into the base software, where a plugin system shines. Thunderbird, similar to Firefox from Mozilla, supports addons/plugins and has a large ecosystems. Here, we will introduce several addons to Thunderbird that make Thunderbird easier
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Latex is stuck with a strange problem, see more information for details.

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$ make pdflatex main.tex This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.16 (TeX Live 2015/Debian) (preloaded format=pdflatex) restricted write18 enabled. entering extended mode (./main.tex LaTeX2e <2016/02/01> Babel <3.9q> and hyphenation patterns for 81 language(s) loaded. (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls Document Class: article 2014/09/29 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo)) (./usenix.sty (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/psnfss/mathptmx.sty)) (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/graphics/epsfig.sty (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/graphics/graphicx.sty (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/graphics/keyval.sty) (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/graphics/graphics.sty (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/graphics/trig.sty) (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/latexconfig/graphics.cfg) (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/pdftex-def/pdftex.def (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/infwarerr.sty) (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/ltxcmds.sty))))) (/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/ifpdf.sty)
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What is the difference between work conserving I/O scheduler and non-work conserving I/O scheduler?

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What is the difference between work conserving I/O scheduler and non-work conserving I/O scheduler? In a work-conserving mode, the scheduler must choose one of the pending requests, if any, to dispatch, even if the pending requests are far away from the current disk head position. The rationale for non-work-conserving schedulers, such as the anticipatory scheduler
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How to tune systems to achieve high performance in virtualization circumstances?

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Most time, we need to tune system parameters to achieve better performance but what the general parameters to be tuned in Linux systems. I think you may want to add following parameters to Kernel boot (/etc/default/grub) parameters intel_idle.max_cstate=0 processor.max_cstate=0 idle=poll intel_pstate=disable At the same time, you may also want to shutdown/open Pause Loop Exiting (PLE).
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How to configure ifcfg-eth0 network scripts on Fedora/RHEL Linux?

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How to configure the ifcfg-* network script files under /etc/sysconfig/network-script/ on Fedora/RHEL Linux? Following is a very typical ifcfg-eth0 file setting static IP/gateway/network mask: DEVICE=eth0 BOOTPROTO=none ONBOOT=yes NETMASK=255.255.0.0 IPADDR=192.168.1.151 GATEWAY=192.168.1.10 USERCTL=no More options are supported, here you can find a reference: Interface Configuration Files (a easier to read PDF from F15 doc).

How to convert PDF to text with format kept on Linux?

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How to convert PDF to text with format kept on Linux? Many of the formatting in PDF will not be available in text. But better keep the text’s relative positions as the same. For example, the table columns should be kept. The pdftotext tool can convert PDF to text pretty well: pdftotext – Portable Document
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Good open-source and free scanner software for Windows?

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Any suggestions on good open-source and free scanner software for Windows? NAPS2 (Not Another PDF Scanner 2) is my favorite opensource scanner software on Windows: http://naps2.sourceforge.net/ Scan documents to PDF and other file types, as simply as possible. NAPS2 is a document scanning application with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. Scan your
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How to merge multiple PDF files to a PDF on Linux?

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convert seems works not very well when merging PDFs. The quality is low. Any other better methods to merge multiple PDF files to a single PDF on Linux? ghostscript works the best for me on merging PDFs: gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sOutputFile=out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf merges in{1..3}.pdf to out.pdf.

How to convert .pptx slides to .jpg or .png images on Linux in command line?

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How to convert .pptx slides to .jpg or .png images on Linux in command line? This following method works best for me. First, convert .pptx file to .pdf using libreoffice: libreoffice –headless –convert-to pdf file.pptx –headless makes libreoffice run in batch mode and not start the GUI. The pdf file will be named file.pdf by
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