Using the Debian based Rasbian (on my Raspberry PI), I recently need to turn some services off and then others on for startup. I knew how to do this on Redhat based distributions, but Debian does things differently.
Instead of chkconfig, Debian provides the update-rc.d utility to turn services on/off at specific runlevels…
While EXT4 may or may not work with CloneZilla / PartedMagic (I have not tested lately, but my last attempt failed miserably), fsarchiver is a very handy little tool for creating an image of this version of the standard Linux filesystem.
If you’re running a munin node and server and also poses a WRT54GL router running DD-WRT, you can easily create graphs for some of the router’s stats in munin via SNMP.
At time x86 and x64 versions of the same package may conflict with each other or with updates of packages that use them.
Yum is a great package manager but yum doesn’t allow removing packages without also removing dependencies on that package. This is where the the old and mighty rpm comes in.
If you’re getting the following error after activating the GeoIP module in AWStats Error: Plugin load for plugin ‘geoipfree’ failed with return code: Error: Can’t locate Geo/IPfree.pm in @INC you’re missing the Perl module required for this.
To install it, SSH to your system and…
If you ever need to search for a particular string in a large amount of files (like checking which domain zones are configured to use a particular nameserver), the following command will come in quite handy:
grep –directories=skip -i -l “searched-string” *.extension
A while back I needed a warning system for when my backups disk runs out of free space.
Gathering information from various other existing scripts, I wrote a small Perl script that check the available space and send warning emails if it drops below a defined level.
Rsync is a very handy tool at synchronizing the contents of two folders/directories.
And while being great for local folders, it also works remotely, via SSH, thanks to the -e ssh parameter: # rsync -ave ssh sourceserver:/home/user/ /home/user will sync /home/user from the sourceserver with /home/user on the local machine.
By default ls does not display hidden files (files with names starting with a dot).
To list hidden files, ls requires the usage of the -A parameter; for example ls -lA. To list only hidden (dotted) files, use this instead: ls -l .??*
When replacing a failed RAID1 member from the array, setting up the replacement disk requires to partition it exactly as the existing disk. But this takes time to do manually…
Fortunately, sfdisk comes in handy by providing a very fast shortcut…
Tugs Uptime Project is a great service for monitoring and recording the uptime of your various hosts.
They have various clients for (almost) all operating systems. Unfortunately all of their clients base the machine id by MD5-ing the machine MAC address. This works perfectly unless you are using a VPS… which will have no MAC address for its network interfaces, generating the same machine ID on every host.
So in an attempt to make their latest Linux client – TUPm – usable on my VPSs, I made some changes to the client and conf file to add support for defining my own custom MAC (when a MAC is not found).
A friend of mine was wondering about using a Raspberry PI as a NAS, the question being: how fast is the PI at file transfers from/to an external hard disk connected via a USB rack.
So I booted up my PI, mounted some random 3.5 inch Samsung 160GB SATA hard drive inside another random Spire USB-SATA external (powered) rack and gave it a go at some testing.
