• Archive of "Geek Stuff" Category

    MySQL Training

    Jake8/12/2008

    This is just for my notes from the MySQL training:

    <b>Prompt command:</b>

    <code>

    prompt \u@\h: [\d]\>

    </code>

    <b>Replication stuff:</b>

    <code>

    change master to master_host=’10.11.231.2′, master_user=’slave’, master_password=’cangetin’, master_port=3306, master_log_file=’mysql-bin.000009′, master_log_pos=106;

    </code>

    Posted in Geek Stuff |
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    Zimbra Mail

    Jake6/24/2008

    This app just really frustrates me…I’m not able to track a single message through the system as I could with cyrus/imap…Extremely frustrating..

    Posted in Geek Stuff |
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    Screen

    Jake

    As a sysadmin I have lots of terminal sessions open simply because it’s usually easier for me to type in few commands as opposed to clicking around the gui. To help with this I use GNU’s Screen command. It allows you to open up a terminal and then detach that window and do that as many times as you like.

    It does get rather confusing sometimes trying to remember what screen session is for what. This is what you see with multiple sessions:

    <code>

    There are screens on:
    15767.pts-0.voodoo (Detached)
    15809.pts-0.voodoo (Detached)

    <code>

    Now I have no idea what is in either of those with that name. And to reattach those screen would require me typing ’screen -r 15767.pts-0.voodoo’. That’s too many keystrokes for my liking ;-). Luckly screen has some options that can help you identify what is on each screen. Using the command ’screen -S server1′. So instead of the output above you’d see:

    <code>
    There are screens on:
    15922.server1 (Detached)
    15964.server2 (Detached)
    </code>

    Now all I have to type to reattach is ’screen -r server1′. Now that’s still a bit too much so I’m going to add an alias to my .bashrc file to make it a bit shorter..
    <code>
    alias jscreen=’screen -S $1′
    </code>

    After I run ’source ~/.bashrc’ and then jscreen will be available. All I have to is type ‘jscreen server3′ and my server3 session is created.

    Posted in Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
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    Problem with rm command

    Jake6/20/2008

    So in trying to clear out a *large* number of emails (>200k) from one our shared folders here at work I ran into the following issue:


    [jwalters@helmsdeep]~/ rm -f 9*
    -bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

    To get around the buffer limitation I ran the following:


    find . -name '9*' | xargs rm -f

    Since raw emails are just a string of numbers I had to run that on all the strings replacing 9 with other numbers. Here is a better explanation of the limitation. Not really related to rm but to the kernel itself. Fairly technical read so beware ;-).

    Posted in Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
    No Comments »

    Free and Open Java

    Jake6/19/2008

    Even though I’m not a fan of Jave, this makes me proud to work at Red Hat. Congrats to all involved in making this happen!

    Rich Sharples’ Blog » Blog Archive » Java is finally Free and Open

    As of writing, Fedora 9 is the only operating system to include a free and open Java SE 6 implementation that has passed the Java TCK. All of the code that makes this possible has been made available to the IcedTea project so everyone can benefit from the work.

    Posted in Awesome Stuff!, Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
    No Comments »

    MP3 Addiction?

    Jake

    Amazon makes it waaaay to easy to download music…I think I’m hooked.

    Posted in Awesome Stuff!, Geek Stuff |
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    Music Downloads for Linux

    Jake6/10/2008

    Finally!!!! For those of you who use Linux AmazonMP3 is the way to go for pay downloads. There is no DRM and the rips are a very high quality (256k). I’ve been using AmazonMP3 for a few days now and they have a really good selection of music from current artists to oldies…So far I’ve purchased the new R.E.M album and an album by Warren G which I used to listen to in the tape deck of my first truck ;-).

    The Fedora 8 RPM that AmazonMP3 provides for their downloader works perfectly with no tweaking. Just install it and go. The downloader is only needed if you buy entire albums. For single songs you can buy and download with your browser’s download manager.

    Two thumbs up Amazon! Thank you very much! :-)

    Posted in Awesome Stuff!, Geek Stuff |
    1 Comment »

    Weird laptop issue

    Jake4/25/2008

    I’ve been using Fedora 9 since the Beta release came out a month or so ago with few problems…I did a fresh install when the Preview release came out last week. I love it! Only a few small, annoying issues so far.

    I was having wireless issues but only at home…That seems to be due to a weird WEP issue and is solved by switching to WPA which I should have done a while ago. Now for the other weird issue…I have my /home, / , and swap encrypted using LUKS. Everything has been fine since the Preview re-install until I got home today..My normal procedure is typing 3 passphrases to decrypt everything when the laptop boots up..

    When I got home my swap passphrase wasn’t working…I couldn’t change the passphrase since it seemed to not have a passphrase set…So here’s what I did:

    This reformatted the swap partition. I wasn’t worried about data since it’s just swap.

    WARNING!
    ========
    This will overwrite data on /dev/sda2 irrevocably.

    Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
    Enter LUKS passphrase:
    Verify passphrase:
    Command successful.

    Now to turn it back into swap

    [root@voodoo ~]# mkswap /dev/sda2
    Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 2146791 kB
    no label, UUID=ce65e513-a0b8-3345-a834-a8989a57ac04

    And finally turn swap on

    swapon /dev/sda2

    Really strange that it all of the sudden lost the passphrase…

    Posted in Computer stuff, Geek Stuff |
    No Comments »

    New Phrase

    Jake1/9/2008

    Today I learned a new phrase. Joe job

    Posted in Geek Stuff |
    2 Comments »

    Funny

    Jake11/27/2007

    So today I got back to my desk and booted my laptop and weird things started happening…My toolbars kept disappearing and and when I opened a terminal I got an error about a resource not being available. I tried removing the usual suspects .gnome*, .gconf*, etc and the same problem. So I moved my home directory and created a new one..Same thing. By this time I’m beyond pissed wondering wtf has happened to my laptop.

    I happened to google the error I got while trying to open a terminal and as soon as I saw the first result I knew exactly what happened. For the last couple of days I’ve been playing around with limiting processes per user in /etc/security/limits.conf and I had forgotten to comment out the line that limited my user to only 50 processes :-D.. I take back all the bad things I said about Fedora..:-)

    Posted in Geek Stuff |
    1 Comment »

    640k is enough

    Jake11/10/2007

    We were watching a recorded episode of Night Court and this kid was describing his “laptop” and he boasted about 640k of memory. I couldn’t help but laugh since last night at work during our monthly maintenance outage I installed 16GB of memory in two different servers…The times they do change.

    Posted in Geek Stuff |
    2 Comments »

    Rate Limiting with Iptables

    Jake11/7/2007

    Pretty good article over at Debian Administration on basic rate limiting using iptables.

    Posted in Geek Stuff, Linux |
    No Comments »

    Quick Fix For A Broken Fedora 7 Boot Partition

    Jake9/25/2007

    So somehow I managed to break Grub this afternoon. I think it was when I was rebuilding my Damn Small Linux rescue image that I keep on my usb key. Damn those rogue grub-install commands ;-)

    Anyway…I went to boot my laptop and where grub usually starts up nothing happened except GRUB showed up in the top right corner. Not good.

    1. Find Fedora rescue cd
    2. Boot said rescue cd
    3. Run the following once system boots

    chroot /mnt/sysimage
    grub-install /dev/sda

    Reboot and all is well with the world…And before anyone asks…I didn’t rescue my system with my usb key because I left it at work :-D

    Posted in Geek Stuff |
    1 Comment »

    Move The Close Button

    Jake8/8/2007

    In Firefox 2 the default behavior is to put the “close tab” X in every tab. I hate that. I want my close button on the very end like it was in Firefox 1. To revert to the old way do the following:

    1. Open a new browser window/tab and in the address bar type “about:config” minus the quotes.
    2. Copy/Paste the following in the search line “browser.tabs.closeButtons” and click “Show All”
    3. You will need to put a number in there. Choose from the following behavior.
      • “0″ Display a close button on the active tab only
      • “1″ Display close button on all tabs (Default)
      • “2″ Don’t display any close buttons
      • “3″ Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior)=

    I choose option 3 since that is what’s most useful to me. Further info can be found in the Mozilla Kbase.

    Posted in Geek Stuff |
    3 Comments »

    Great Stuff

    Jake8/7/2007

    Yea..I laughed out loud at this.

    Kludge Spot: 20 Things I Learned From Tech Support

    Posted in Geek Stuff |
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