Sysadmin

some tools and techniques that make it much easier to debug what your wayward application is doing.

The windows event tracing can give detailed information about what has happened to a broken request that fails before or after it gets to the IIS7 pipeline.

Failed request tracing is a handy IIS7 feature for debugging what’s happening when there are problems with modules or handlers in the IIS pipeline.

The first thing I wanted to try as part of my using gmail as my mail client experiment was importing all my contacts, half from Thunderbird and half from Yahoo mail. Gmail supports importing comma separated (CSV) lists and both Thunderbird and yahoo mail support exporting in that format so it’s pretty straight forward. I’ve [...]

Ms Multitasker has found another thing she really likes about Ubuntu. Being able to surf the internet while the thing installs!

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 25/udp mailsmtps 465/tcp # SMTP over SSL (TLS)

I love VNC and I love this command: /usr/bin/vncserver -geometry 1024×768

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 [...]

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 $( find $directory -name $filename ) do matches=`cat $file | [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 to install [...]

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.

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.

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 [...]

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.