I’ve seen on the internet, and elsewhere, that when there are too many arguments for rm(1) to handle, that the following command will suffice: % find /path -exec rm -rf {} \; While certainly functional, it’s not optimal. If there are thousands of files (as is often the case at my job), this command is [...]
I created a Debian package for Salt, doing my best to adhere to the Debian Policy. You can find it at http://mentors.debian.net/package/salt. If you’re not familiar with Salt, head over to http://saltstack.org and check it out. From the author’s website: Salt is a powerful remote execution manager that can be used to administer servers in [...]
Too often, I see the recommendation on forums, IRC, and elsewhere across the internet to use improper tools for creating ISO images. For example, consider the following two commands, both of which are not the correct way to build a CD/DVD image: $ dd if=/dev/scd0 of=cdimage.iso # NO! Or worse yet: $ cat /dev/scd0 > [...]
This post comes from BashFAQ/081 on Greg’s Wiki. He argues why you should not be using which(1) to determine if a command is in your $PATH at the end of the page. I’ll put that argument at the front: The command which(1) (which is often a csh script, although sometimes a compiled binary) is not [...]
I have chosen the path of system administration for my career. It’s been very rewarding, and I really love my job. However, there are times when I make stupid mistakes that cost others money. I’m sure we’ve all been there. It’s stressful, embarrassing and can really shake you up, if you mistake is bad enough. [...]
Recently, I’ve made the switch from GNU Screen to Tmux for my remote terminal multiplexor. I still prefer GNU Screen for serial connections, however (something the Tmux developers don’t seem to think is important). So, when getting it setup, I wanted my hardstatus line to imitate my GNU Screen hardstatus line as closely as possible. [...]
I will be attending the Ohio Linux Fest this September (in about two weeks) giving a talk on “Password Theory and Breaking Encrypted Filesystems”. The talk covers some theory on what exactly makes a “secure password”, including some mathematics, entropy, random number generators, shadowed passwords, salts, rainbow tables and cryptographic hashes. I end the talk [...]
This post comes from Matt Taggart, who put together a document about the best practices for using OpenSSH. A lot of the points brought up in that document rang the bells of common sense, and are so good, it’s worth blogging about in hopes that the points mentioned therein reach as many as possible. I’ve [...]
This post is a quickie to see what the current generation is like these days. I’m an old fart (not as old as many reading this post), but I remember when 5 1/4″ floppy drives were “standard”, and 3 1/2″ were the new fad. Then came Iomega Jazz drives, and the like. CDRW hit the [...]
Quick post, outlining what I think makes the Unix family of operating systems superior, including “unix-like” operating systems such as GNU/Linux, BSD, and others. Of course, the list isn’t exhaustive- it’s just something I threw together in 10 minutes. The motivation of the post was a discussion in ##unix on Freenode. The command line interface. [...]
I’ve been tasked at work with shredding drives. Not physically, mind you, but digitally. Usually, I grab a copy of the latest version of Knoppix, boot up, pull up a terminal, and grab GNU Shred. Something like: shred -n 3 -v /dev/sda It works well enough. However, it doesn’t display a real useful progress meter, [...]
I just discovered Newsbeuter supports synchronization with Google Reader. Not only your read/unread feed items, but you can also share and star items in Newsbeuter as you can in the Google Reader interface. This blog post is documenting how. Further, by using Buzz, you can also comment on your shared items, and others. I’ll cover [...]
Tagged email, google, mutt, newsbeuter, reader, rssJust over the past couple of weeks, I have done a few Debian GNU/Linux installations for various people, including myself. I am a minimalist. I like to have installed on my system only exactly what I specify. However, I’m also a realist, and know that Debian has likely chosen sane defaults in the installer when [...]
At work, we use Symantec NetBackup for all our full and incremental backups to tape. With currently about 100 servers in operation, and roughly 300+ virtual development environments on the horizon using RHEV, NetBackup and Bare Metal Restore, also from Symantec, will be crucial in our operations. Recently, we had some virtual servers take a [...]
The motivation for this post, actually, is that I had heard of the BSD-licensed tmux. I’ve heard it’s far more configurable than GNU screen and lighter on resources. So, I thought I’d install it on my Debian machine, and give it a quick test drive. The first thing I wanted to test, was not attaching [...]
