Interesting article on the different levels and skill set of System Administrators:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sysadmin-101-leveling
Andrea
The politics of the Linux desktop
Interesting read.
If you're working in open source, why would you use anything but Linux as your main desktop?
https://opensource.com/article/17/11/politics-linux-desktop
Andrea
How to soft reset Linux disks
Sometimes disks stop responding and cause issues/slowness to the whole system, simply because the system is expecting some sort of response.
In these cases, the device/disk would appear to be 100% utilised (e.g. in iostat) and to avoid having to reboot the whole system, it needs to be reset.
For[......]
Find sdx device/ATAx mappings
When dealing with hardware, you often see messages in the logs about disk issues or warnings.
Messages like:
ata9: hard resetting link ata9: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310) ata9.00: configured for UDMA/33 ata9: EH complete
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar [email protected][......]
Convert Squid/timestamps to a human readable format
Somebody had the brilliant idea to use Unix timestamps in the Squid log.
I suppose this makes it easy to parse, not so easy to read for us humans though!
This is an elegant and common way of solving this problem:
cat /var/log/squid/access.log | perl -p -e 's/^([0-9]*)/"[".localtime($1)."]"/e'[......]
bash – remove first line with tail and last line with head
You can achieve the same result with other (more powerful) tools, but I like this approach because it's the simplest I can think of.
Let's say you have this text file called test.txt
line 1 line 2 line 3
Remove the first line
tail -n +2 test.txt line 2 line 3
Remove the last l[......]
sed – match and replace BIND/DNS serial number programmatically
I had to make some modifications to several BIND zone files, sed proved itself invaluable once again!
All the zone files looked something like this:
domain.com. IN SOA ns1.domain.com. postmaster.domain.com. (
2015021001 ; Serial
600 ; Refresh (10 minu[......]
Remove all non-ascii characters with perl
Sometimes when creating one-liners, when the source is not "clean", you may end up with non-ascii characters which make the parsing harder.
To get rid of all of it, you can use perl.
cat dirty-source.txt|perl -pe 's/[^[:ascii:]]//g' > clean-output.txt
The same command can be used on a file[......]
Converting spreadsheets to text files with ssconvert
ssconvert is a utility shipped with Gnumeric, and it's a command line spreadsheet converter.
Let's say that you have some data in a spreadsheet (eg spreadsheet.ods) and want to be able to easily parse it, and maybe use it in a script.
ssconvert -O 'separator=;' spreadsheet.ods parsable-data.tx[......]
Firefox – prevent websites from refreshing
Fed up with websites/tabs continuously reloading themselves and using resources unnecessarily?
Me too!
In firefox, you can disable this from the about:config page.
Look for accessibility.blockautorefresh and set it to true.
Problem solved!
You can also keep an eye on what tab uses most of[......]