SSH never ceases to amaze me. It’s like the swiss army knife of network connections and firewall busting. For years I’ve used SSH tunneling to overcome barriers (read firewalls) stuck into my path. I’ve never been one to be malicious, but there are times when I need a certain connection that is [...]

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff 2 Comments »

This morning I did a bare bones CentOS 5.1 installation onto a machine. I don’t need Gnome, KDE, or any other window manager. However, I did need to forward the display over SSH for one of the programs that I need to run. For the life of me I could not figure [...]

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As someone coming from Linux I find working in Solaris completely backwards. Case in point: Today I needed to get the drive information from a Solaris machine. Of all commands the one to use is “format.” Go figure. Anyway, here’s how to do it, thanks to this article:
bash-3.00# format
Searching for disks…done

AVAILABLE [...]

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The piece of software that I test at work has an option to enable debug logging to a file. Normally, I run with this enabled so that I have a record of what I did and any errors that I encounter. However, this file can become extremely bloated and if often hundreds of [...]

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff, Linux No Comments »

I just finished installing VMWare Workstation 6.0.3 under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) and ran into some issues.  During the configuration, when VMWare is compiling drivers for the system, I got an error saying “include/asm/bitops_32.h:9:2: error: #error only <linux/bitops.h> can be included directly”
From my reading this seems to be related to version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel. [...]

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In the lab today I was having problems with a slow network.  In tracing the cables from the computer I found they went into a hub, not a switch.  After recovering from shock I checked the card settings to see what duplex mode they were in.  It turns out that in addition to being connected [...]

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Crontab has got to be one of the greatest programs ever written. How in the world did we get along before being able to schedule the periodic execution of commands? Of course when I am setting up a cron job I seldom remember the order of the fields, so at the top of [...]

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I think it’s a safe bet to say that anyone who has been in software testing or programming for any length of time has had to create a regular expression (RE). Most of the RE’s that I create are simple and I can do them quickly. However, this past week I had need [...]

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff, Programming No Comments »

My normal operating system of choice is Ubuntu Linux which has a nice little frequency scaling applet. Normally I leave the frequency switching scheme set to “On Demand” which will alter the speed according to the load. Sometimes, when I really need to save on power I will set the scheme to lowest [...]

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There are many browser plugins that will manage your passwords and generate random passwords for you. These are great if you have just one computer that you use. For me, I have a Linux computer at work, a laptop for work, and a home computer. There are some sites that I want [...]

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