Sysadmin

Another thing I like about Ubuntu!

Ms Multitasker has found another thing she really likes about Ubuntu. Being able to surf the internet while the thing installs!
Published in Sysadmin on Sunday, February 11th, 2007

Impulsive decision – putting the penguin on my laptop

I did something a bit impulsive on the weekend. I have heaps of friends who love linux so I decided I’d try it out for myself. I backed everything up, wiped XP off my drive and installed a friendly distribution called Kubuntu on my laptop. The installation itself was fairly painless. The only real problem I [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Monday, February 5th, 2007

Making videos for my ipod from DVDs (that I own)

I discovered how much I love watching video on my ipod this week. I’ve been going to the gym as part of my 2007 new years resolution and started watching a video podcast of an Australian show my friend recommended. Suddenly my brain had something more interesting to think about than how likely it was that [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Saturday, January 13th, 2007

Getting SecondLife to work on linux

The other thing I needed to do to get SecondLife to run on my linux machine was actually installing the SecondLife program. 1. Grab the files from the server and extract them wget http://secondlife.com/downloads/viewer/SecondLife_1_9_0_21.tar.bz2tar -xjvf SecondLife_1_9_0_21.tar.bz2 2. Run the secondlife script in the extracted directory: ./secondlife Pretty simple when you have a linux guru like Vadim helping [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Thursday, June 8th, 2006

Installing NVidia drivers on Fedora

I wanted to use the nice graphics card in my linux box to play Second Life so I needed to install the right drivers to make it do all the 3D acceleration stuff. To test whether it was installed I used a program called glxgears that you can run that does some 3D rendering and tells [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Thursday, June 8th, 2006

Finding port numbers in Linux

Vadim gave me a cool tip for finding out the port numbers for things in linux. You can just look at the /etc/services file to see what port things are registered for. > grep smtp /etc/services smtp 25/tcp mailsmtp [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Saturday, November 26th, 2005

Starting VNC at a specified screen resolution

I love VNC and I love this command: /usr/bin/vncserver -geometry 1024x768
Published in Sysadmin on Sunday, September 11th, 2005

How to find out what your wayward app is really doing

My friend has shown my the most awesome linux debugging tool. It’s a little tool called strace that shows you what function calls your wayward application is actually doing. In my case, I couldn’t get Apache to see any directories that weren’t under DocumentRoot. So I started httpd using the strace program like this: strace -f /sbin/service [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Saturday, August 27th, 2005

Shell script: find files with a filename containing keywords

I just wanted to save a little shell script I wrote that searches a directory for files with a certain filename that contain a certain text string. if [ $# -ne 3 ] then echo "Usuage: fancyFind.sh exit fi directory=$1 filename=$2 keywords=$3 for file in [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Saturday, August 27th, 2005

Advanced shell scripting guide

I found a really great guide to shell scripting. It’s about the best reference document to shell scripting that I’ve seen. It has all the things you need to get around a new language like control structures, creating functions and using variables. It also explains the things you need to understand to understand shell scripting like [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Saturday, August 27th, 2005

Wiping the boot sector of a drive

A nifty trick (thanks to Vadim) if you need to wipe the boot sector of your drive: 1. Boot machine off Knoppix CD 2. Open terminal and type the following command to write 512 bytes worth of zeros to the beginning of the disk dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 count=1 bs=512 3. Remind Vadim he *is* a GOD 4. Reboot machine with [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005

How to burn a CD in linux on the command line

1. Create an iso to burn to your CD. In my case I already had one, but there’s a nice HOW-TO in the tutorial I was reading. mkisofs -r -o myiso mydirectory/ 2. Make sure that linux knows there’s a CD drive connected to your box. If nothing comes up, then you’ll have [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005

msconfig lets you configure your computer's startup

After enjoying my friend’s rant about the hundreds of programs running in the taskbar (yes I *need* real and quicktime to always be running on my computer) I found out there’s a nifty little program called “msconfig” that lets you choose what starts when you boot your PC.
Published in Sysadmin on Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

Setting classpath for java

I always find it’s a hassle to set up the java classpath. In unix: export CLASSPATH=/path/to/my/directory Resources: Nice tutorial that explains how to set the classpath.
Published in Sysadmin on Thursday, January 13th, 2005

Treating a mapped drive as local

I’ve been having to keep my NUnit tests on my local drive because the network drive the rest of my project lives on doesn’t have enough permissions to run them. This is bad because I can’t keep the tests with the code they’re testing and I keep forgetting to back them up. The PC I’m using [...]
Published in Sysadmin on Monday, November 22nd, 2004

Substrings in bat files

Useful snippet of code for getting substrings in windows batch files: Code: SET VARIABLE=%OTHERVARIABLE:~index,length% Example: SET FIRSTNAME=%HELENNAME:~0,5% Source: windows 2000 mailing list.
Published in Sysadmin on Monday, September 27th, 2004