I cannot count how many times I have thrown my hands up in frustration as Windows keeps yelling at me about a being unable to delete a file because it is still open. Who is holding it open? Enter Process Explorer. For a sampling of its many cool features you can read [...]

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The find command is Linux is seriously cool. It allows you to do so much more than simply locate where a file lives. You can also do nifty stuff like delete all the temporary files on your whole hard drive, find broken links, delete empty files, search within files, and more. You [...]

Posted in Bash/Shell, Linux No Comments »

I love most things about the great and powerful Linux; however, there are some things that will get you into some serious trouble. File recover in Linux is non-trivial, so it’s best to not delete something unless you are sure you want it. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to type ‘rm * .tmp’ instead [...]

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I’ve always been an Open Source fan, but I must say that I am particularly impressed by the quality of GParted. GParted allows you to non-destructively resize and manipulate hard drive partitions. Many Live CD’s contain GParted and allow you to resize various filesystems such as: FAT, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, XFS, and more. [...]

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Most of the clusters of servers that I administer are diskless — they receive their boot images over the network using PXE. These are Linux clusters, and the diskless nodes all boot Linux images, however, a couple months ago I had need to boot a DOS disk image. This is very similar to [...]

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I just recently upgraded the computers here to Ubuntu Dapper from Breezy. On one of the computers I was trying to install webmin using apt-get, but with no luck. I finally found out that webmin was removed from the Ubuntu repository at the authors request. The instructions for setting up webmin under [...]

Posted in Administration, Linux No Comments »

Since part of my job entails system administration I get to spend a lot of time configuring, fixing, setting up, and tweaking computers. I’m currently setting up several servers and since my favorite Linux distribution of all time is Ubuntu, guess what I’m installing?
Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, and as such uses apt to [...]

Posted in Linux 4 Comments »

It is sometimes useful to pipe binary data over a ssh connection. I use this sometimes when I want to back up the data on a machine over the network without creating a backup file first.
 
tar -cf - dir_to_backup | ssh user@hostname ‘cat > backup.tar’

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On a typical project there are many different computers that I must use. For years I have been using scp to copy files from one computer to another and wishing for a way to just mount the SSH filesystem. Well, my wish finally came true!
The good news is that thanks to sshfs I [...]

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This past week I created a Python script to test a certain CORBA component. The component uses callbacks to pass data back to the caller. So, in theory, all one has to do is register a callback with the CORBA object, call the Start() method, and let the data start coming.
Now, once I [...]

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