This is another article that sat in the drafts folder for far too long- Last edited Feb 21st, 2006. I fear writing about tar, and that is why I’m determined to finish it in this sitting, so it won’t fester and scare me off of this series. Why am I scared of writing about tar? Well, this is their flags list verbatim from the man page: [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --blocking-factor N ] [ -B, --read-full-records ] [ --backup BACKUP-TYPE ] [ --block-com- press ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [ --check-links ] [ --checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [ --force-local ] [ --format FORMAT ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -G, --incremental ] [ --group GROUP ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ --help ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-case ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ --index-file FILE ] [ -j, --bzip2 ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ --keep-newer-files ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --touch, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ --mode PER- MISSIONS ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ --newer-mtime DATE ] [ --no-anchored ] [ --no-ignore-case ] [ --no-recursion ] [ --no-same-permissions ] [ --no-wildcards ] [ --no-wildcards-match-slash ] [ --null ] [ --numeric-owner ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability, --no-same-owner ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ --occurrence NUM ] [ --overwrite ] [ --overwrite-dir ] [ --owner USER ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --abso- lute-names ] [ --pax-option KEYWORD-LIST ] [ --posix ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --block-number ] [ --record-size SIZE ] [ --recursion ] [ --recursive-unlink ] [ --remove-files ] [ --rmt-command CMD ] [ --rsh-command CMD ] [ -s, --same- order, --preserve-order ] [ -S, --sparse ] [ --same-owner ] [ --show-defaults ] [ --show-omitted-dirs ] [ --strip-com- ponents NUMBER, --strip-path NUMBER (1) ] [ --suffix SUFFIX ] [ -T, --files-from F ] [ --totals ] [ -U, --unlink- first ] [ --use-compress-program PROG ] [ --utc ] [ -v, --verbose ] [ -V, --label NAME ] [ --version ] [ --volno-file F ] [ -w, --interactive, --confirmation ] [ -W, --verify ] [ --wildcards ] [ --wildcards-match-slash ] [ --exclude PATTERN ] [ -X, --exclude-from FILE ] [ -Z, --compress, --uncompress ] [ -z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip ] [ -[0-7][lmh] ] So it’s a bit overwhelming.

This article was originally written back on Feb 21st, 2006. While never completed, I thought it was worth sharing. Cat is a very simple utility- so simple I debated added it to this list. There are however three really useful flags. I’ll try to write as much as I can about it so you don’t feel ripped off by this article. hrm… did that last sentence sound like filler? I swear it wasn’t meant to- that’s completely on accident.

So while migrating some content to a Linode instance, I attempted to fire up screen ran face first into a brick wall. For context, this was on an up-to-date CentOS 5.5 instance running screen-4.0.3-3.el5. Steps to reproduce: logged in as my normal user typed in “screen” and hit enter console went blank for 5 seconds previous content returned, along with “[screen is terminating]” and my normal command prompt. Screen didn’t work for any regular users, however it did work for root.

So this year I managed to snag the Humble Bundle package;Â If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a pack of Indie Games bundled together. There are five good reasons why you should consider getting it: Name your own price ($5000 or $0.01 – your call) You choose who the money goes to (charities and/or developers) If you pay more than the average donation, you get Humble Bundle #1 from last year.

New job, new laptop. Many utilities here are windows only, so it requires a bit of… effort… to get myself up and running efficiently. The solution to the windows problem is VirtualBox. I had set this up on my last laptop with little effort, but this time around required a bit more effort. Hopefully the instructions below will help others get up and running quickly. Disclaimer– your laptop may catch on fire and explode (or worse) if you attempt this… or something.

die you wretched pc speaker beep that is so loud when I use the find bar in firefox or tab complete in the cli and nothing is found! rmmod pcspkr echo blacklist pcspkr >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist aaah, glorious silence.

Can’t locate object method “seek” via package “File::Temp” at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/MIME/Parser.pm line 816. The underlying problem is perl was updated and overwrote the “correct” version of File::Temp that you probably installed when setting up RT and forgot about. To fix this issue <br></br>cpan install File::Temp<br></br>/etc/init.d/httpd restart<br></br> MAKE SURE TO RESTART APACHE! I didn’t, and it cost me probably 2 hours of screwing around with it. I’m posting this because http://www.nabble.com/RT-3.6.5-and-Sendmail-error-and-looks-like-perl-error-td15989015.html Didn’t really mention what the final working solution was.

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

For those of you who can’t get those three to work together, make sure you specify both TLS_CACERT tls_cacertfile- I didn’t and it caused me grief.

Ok, I’ve done it twice now, I think I’ve figured it out. Get the source files from Epson’s linux website; I don’t recall the url but these are the files you need (or newer, no idea what the future holds): iscan-2.3.0-1.c2.i386.rpm iscan-plugin-gt-f700-2.0.0-0.c2.i386.rpm Use alien to convert them to debs (normally bad, but acceptable this time around). Install both newly created deb packages with dpkg: dpkg -i iscan_2.3.0-2_i386.deb iscan-plugin-gt-f700_2.0.0-1_i386.deb Install sane, sane-utils:

So I got the new hardware parts, so I figured I might as well document the process. I’ve decided on the name Unicron because it’s the biggest PC I’ve ever owned. I’ve been waiting over a year to really rebuild my servers- since I ran out of ide connectors in Pablo, I knew something had to change. The new case is MASSIVE- it’s sitting next to jackie’s machine and is a good 6″ longer and 3″ higher.

Diff is a handy little command used to compare two text files- useful if trying to determine what’s changed in different versions of files, used by subversion to show what files have been changed, and can even create patch files for updating sourcecode. So what are some of the more useful flags? * -i lets us ignore any capitalization changes * -b lets us ignore any spacing changes * -B ignore blank lines

Route is one of these hate-inspiring, jaw droppingly obtuse programs that you always get the syntax wrong on. The purpose is simple enough- show and/or change the routing table. The most common uses are: route – shows the current entries route add – adds a new entry route del – removes an entry route flush– removes all entries Checking out your Routes The simplest use of route is to simply run route at the command line:

Ok, trying out Kubuntu on my new work laptop and I’m liking it quite a bit- the only problems I’ve had so far are with Hibernate (which I think is self- inflicted) and wireless stuff. I’ve figured out the wireless stuff and wanted to mention it for the people out there having the same troubles as I did. First up, a little info on my setup: Model: IBM T42 (note, not the T42p, which is awesome, the crappier model)

I have two requirements for a program being on this list: the first one is it has to be a utility- something scriptable or usable on the command line. The second is it also needs to have multiple arcane flags that I can write about, or just be so unknown that it’ll bring it to the attention of people that have never heard of it. Tee falls into the “never heard of it” group.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

I have a wacom drawing pad, and one thing that’s always bothered me was the whole way linux handled usb items- depending on the order they were plugged in, they would be given different names- sometimes my keyboard would be “/dev/input/event1”, sometimes my wacom or mouse. Udev was made to get around these issues, but I’ve been to distracted to give it much thought. lately I’ve been getting the following error messages with my ruby projects:

Today I find myself a little of both. I was called into the confrence room today and told that the company I was contracted to requested that today be my last day. Yes, I am officially unemployed. Fortunately I was laid off, not fired- turns out business wasn’t as good as they were hoping and they can’t afford someone to try and fix their broken infrastructure. Since they fired a developer a few weeks ago, and the lead developer put in his 1 week notice today, I can’t say it’s suprising- if they’re getting rid of me after losing two other people, they must be hemmoraging money pretty badly.

so the devs are having a hell of a time with the new dev server- it’s constantly locking up on certain threads for 30-45 seconds. apache mainly, but occasionally grep and other things. It appears to be completely random. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to find the problem, and I think I got it nailed down thanks to a post on the gentoo forums (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-189180-highlight-writethru.html) that said to change some settings in the raid card’s firmware… I tested this on the prod machine since it’s not in use yet(they’re both dell 2850’s with the lsi megaraid cards) and benchmarked before and after with bonnie++… here are the results(- is original, + is new):

I have a habit of moving stuff to my website’s root directory and sending temp links to people. I’ve recently went about cleaning it out (which I do about once a year) and found some interesting bits… Here’s a job posting I wrote for a position we were hiring for at a previous employer: We're currently looking for a Mid-Upper level Perl Web Application Developer. If FrontPage or Dreamweaver is on your resume, please do not reply.

So I learned something new today. Apparently our UPS is rated to 3K, and we just added 3 new machines to it, putting it at 4 out of 5 bars for load. These three new machines are running gentoo on dual-xeon processors. I made the mistake of attempting to recompile subversion on all three machines at the same time. Suddenly, all the servers stopped responding. When we went into the serverroom, all the machines in the dell rack were off- the UPS had tripped.

If you need to paste into vim from somewhere else, and your code has tabs or spaces in it, you’ll notice that vim may add extra tabs. see, vim doesn’t see it as a paste event, it sees it as “you typing really fast”- and one thing vim does will is auto-indent. The problem is when you paste, you don’t want auto-indentation because your code is already indented. to temporarily turn off auto-indenting, try this from insert mode:

ran into a problem with mod_rewrite and IE- a real one this time. IE was choking on files that were being downloaded via mod_rewrite. same script worked without rewrite, died with it. Did some research and with a lot of help from noodl of #apache figured out it was because mod_rewrite adds a “Vary: Host” line to the header, which apparently IE chokes on. loaded the header module in apache and added “Header unset Vary” after my rewrite and all is good- cvs, pdf, zip all download properly.

ok, here’s my latest bout of IE stupidity. The new system I’m setting up will have several developers working on several projects. We’d like to be able to use subversion to manage the projects without dealing with pathname stupidity, hence all new projects should have / as their base since they will later become full fledge sites. So, how do we do that? I had the simple idea of mapping http://foo.

Another well used mode is Visual Mode, which turns your cursor into a hilighter. open a textfile with several lines of text ad move the cursor to the middle switch from command mode to visual mode: v You’ll notice as you move the cursor around, you highlight different sections from the point you started to the point you left. you can press [esc] to return to command mode. hilight a few lines of text from command mode:

Deleting in vim can be done several ways- in insert mode, the delete key and backspace key perform as you’d expect them to, but what if you want more? delete the character to the left of the cursor: [esc]d[left arrow] delete the character to the right of the cursor: [esc]d[right arrow] deleting the current line from insert mode: [esc]dd deleting the current line and the one below from insert mode:

Vim is a great tool, but using is can be a pita in the beginning- hence, we go through the basics. There are several command modes, but we’ll only discuss a few at first: Command Mode and Insert Mode. Command mode is used to perform actions like saving, searching, etc. Insert mode is used to insert and delete text. You’ll be switching between them a lot. Open a file from the cli:

I use vim a lot. a *LOT*. One thing that really annoys me is page width. When I’m writing code, I like to have a width set to 78 characters. But in some instances, say when I’m working on a book, I like the width set to 90 characters since it’s easier to read. This got me thinking… if I had vim check the current directory for a config, I could have custom configs for different directories.

Something that is really aggrivating the hell out of me is FreeBSD’s package management system. I’ve heard people go on and on about how it’s the best out there, but frankly I’m unimpressed. The main reason for this is there is no way to determine ALL of the dependencies that are going to be installed when I install a package. Lets do a comparison of a freeciv install on my workstations vs the freebsd server:

Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities. First up, we’ll use a simple example of a regular expression. Suppose for some reason, you want a list of the Input Device names used by Xorg, and plan on piping it into another script later on.

I don’t know if BSD can smell the gnu in my blood or what, but it is seriously putting up a fight. As I mentioned in the previous post’s followups, I got kde working finally- however every time I pop open Konqueror and hit slashdot, the entire machine locks solid. Not just konqueror, not just X; the whole machine. Now, I know slashdot has a troll meme about BSD dying, but this is ridiculous.

Whereis is an older utility- it’s functionality shows us of a time when a program not only had a man page, but also stored the source on the machine in question. That’s becoming more rare as programs like firefox come into play- firefox, for example, has no man page and doesn’t install the source (due to size issues). Whereis locates the binary, man page and source of a given command on the current machine.

So yesterday a coworker came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to FOSE- I have a vague idea it was a government tech convention, but that’s about it. Since I have a Gov’t ID badge, I was able to get in for free. So Cris(the boss), David and Terrance went into DC in search of the washington DC convention center. It should be noted that this is not the MCI Center, Metro Center, or the Verizon Center- it’s a completely generic convention center with a completely generic name.

My friend k_f sent me a link containing the resignation of the debian stable maintainer. I can completely see where he’s coming from- the Debian crowd seems to have collected all of the antisocial jerks over the years. I sent him the following letter of support: Hi there, I caught your post to the debian team’s mailing list from a friend (http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00008.html ). As a former debian user, I wanted to let you know I fully support you.

Since I covered chmod last week, I figured I should touch upon chown this week. chown is infinitely less complex than chmod because you don’t have to worry about actual permissions. chown is mainly used by root, but I suppose it could be used by others as well, although it will happen much less often. chown can change the owner and group of a file or files. Standard usage goes something like this

I finally got around to modifying the sa-stats script k_f gave me- it now works on my setup of postfix+gentoo+spamd. I unzipped, cat’ed and parsed my logs for the last 7 days and came up with the following stats: Total messages: Ham: Spam: % Spam: -------------------------------------------------- 572 196 376 65.73% Average spam score : 20.04/6.00 Average ham score : -9.04/6.00 Username: Total: Ham: Spam: % Spam: ------------------------------------------------------------ 572 196 376 65.

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

Chmod is a utility used for changing permissions. It is fairly well known, and doesn’t have a lot of obscure flags, which makes it an odd choice for this series. I’m including it because it seems like the most logical way to touch on linux file permissions, which can be the bane of new linux user. Let me cover permissions first, then we’ll move on to chmod. Simple Permissions (I’m only touching on “simple” permissions because they’re difficult enough to grasp without throwing in super user and stickey bits, or attributes like immutable.

Got an interesting call today. ———— guy on phone: Hi, I’m with thje intrusion detection team- we had a wolverine alert that your machine set off, I was wondering if you could enable your machine so I could remote in and check it out and make sure you’re not infected. me: Which machine was it? guy on phone: *reads off a machine number* me: Ah. ok, you won’t be able to- that’s my laptop, and it’s not running windows, it’s running linux.

With the exception of maybe cd (which is boring), ls is probably the command you’ll use the most if you do a fair amount of work at the command line. ls lists files. It’s simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of information about those files that you can list as well. ls by itself will list the contents of all regular files and directories in the current directory. you can provide with with a target such as ls /foo or with multiple targets like ls /mnt /opt or ls foo.

I’ve apparently become either very brave, or very stupid in my old age. Last night at 10pm I reset my router and flashed it’s firmware with an open source alternative. A few years back, some Linksys tech realized the usefulness of some open source components and implemented them in the firmware of their routers- they just forgot to follow the license agreement of the software they used and didn’t tell anyone or release the source code and the changes they made.

Screen is probably one of the top 10 most useful programs in the unix world- why? Because of what it does. Screen lets you create a session on a machine and then disconnect, while the session stays open. Suppose you wanted to start a large compile on your home server before you left work, but needed to shut down your laptop and bring it home. You could ssh into the machine and simply start the compiling, but the compilation would stop when you broke the ssh connection by shutting off the laptop.

Wget is useful for a lot of things- downloading images from a directory listing, mirroring a website, recursively fetching one subdirectory of a website, etc. The main focus as you can tell is downloading from the web(http, https, ftp) in a non-interactive manner. There are a lot of flags to change the behavior, and you can get all sorts of wild behavior by mixing and matching those flags. The most straightforward use is this:

I’ve been wanting to take a linux certification for some time now. It’s been a goal, but I don’t feel I’m ready. Lately I’ve been studying a lot, trying to prepare myself and took a few practice exams. The first pre-exam I took was a Linux+ pre-test from skillsoft, which I got a 92% on, which made me fell pretty good. The next one I took was an LPIC test out of the back of my LPIC Exam Cram book.

Well, sorta- they’re not new to linux, but they installed Debian on their home machines as part of a 2 month experiment. Yojimbo is looking for a better job, and I’ve been trying to help him develop some skills that will make it easier. I’ve taught him a little perl in the past and he’s used linux at the college (EOS lab at GVSU), so it wasn’t too big of a jump.

So i’m getting slapped around a bit by karma right now. I recently moved our DNS services to two new servers. everything appeared to be fine… I got cocky. Now it turns out they’re not behaving like proper slaves for certain domains. fore xample, we run foo.com, bar.com and bar.net as the primary DNS. We ALSO act as slaves for baz.org… except we’re not anymore. For some reason, we’re not getting updates from the primary DNS for baz.

I don’t even know where to begin. This morning has sucked and it’s no ones fault but my own. It started with the DMA crap- the one machine where it would really help is the fileserver. I needed to simply change the chipset driver, recompile the kernel, and reboot. This should be simple for even a semi-competent linux users. However, I am a moron. Each mistake I make, I’m gonna put a little * next to it.

so I created a list of things I needed to do, and started incrementally going through it, finishing little projects and problems that I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve got a whole lot done in the past week: got squirrelmail working properly fixed the DMA on both workstations Fixed Jaxon’s cdrom Set up Kmail Fixed the DNS issues Swapped HDs around get spanish dictionary working for jackie in OOo Set up LDAP Some of these have been floating in my head for years (ldap) while others have been broken for just as long (DMA, squirrelmail).

So I’m running out of space. on everything. my workstation has a 40 gig split in half with 1/2 linux and half a long dead windows partition (I got this drive in 2001 or thereabouts.) the windows partition has been repurposed, but it’s still a pain in the ass. since the windows partition appears first on the drive, there was no way to wipe it and merge it with the other parition (easily).

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

One thing I’ve been putting off for years was learning electronics. Like everything else, I’m not immediately good at it, but I think with persistence I’ll learn the basics and hopefully become competent. I picked up an Electronics Demystified book about 3 months ago and read the first chapter; I decided to put off reading more until I had a chance to get my 130 in one electronics kit that I got when I was younger.

I’ve been using Gentoo for over 2 years now. Before that it was Debian. Before that it was Redhat. Spattered inbetween I’ve used slackware, mandrake, suse, knoppix, ubuntu, xandros and sorceror. I’ve noticed when I pick up a new distribution, there’s always little bits and tips that people forget to tell you about. I’m gonna try to make a list for gentoo. emerge Emerge is the main package management tool for gentoo- as such, there are several useful tips that may make your life easier.

This started with a comment from my friend Shedao about putting a life ban on slashdot. I’ve been reading slashdot since 2000 or so. I’ve seen the ups and downs. I listened to geeks in space and cheered when katz went away. So why am I deciding to leave slashdot? Because of Beatle Beatle, the submission spammer. You see, slashdot has a lot of power in the google pagerank system because of it’s size, links and traffic.

You know what I’d like to see? Someone plop down a series of books aimed at introducing a user or Sys admin of a particular Linux Distribution to another Distribution; for example “Administrating Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 for Debian Administrators” or “Using Suse for Gentoo Users” . Hell, they don’t even have to be big books- maybe 200-600 pages. Ebooks would probably be the way to go since it will probably not sell a whole lot of copies.

So in order to keep this job, I have to be cleared for a position of public trust. This means I have to document Every Place I’ve lived in the last 7 years Every Place I’ve workd in the last 7 years A Contact for each one of the above 3 people who know me well. So if I start asking weird questions, and you get calls from the Feds, don’t freak out- I’m not going to jail- it’s just clearance.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

So, Today we did the the rest of the training, which was just a big Q&A. Whether or not this is the right choice of software, I’ve given up caring- I’m not in a position to make the decision, and the decision will be made for political, not technical reasons which I will have no effect on. So I’ve quit agonizing about it. You could say, I suppose, [meme] I don’t care.

Alright, yesterday was a long day. training started at 8:30am, went till 5:30pm. What did I learn? That’s a damn good question. I learned how to use a web interface for extremely complicated tracking program . My biggest complaint is this training cannot be abstracted to be useful on other projects; it’s basically a 2 day training course on an obscure application. What I liked: clean interface, worked in both Firefox and IE.

I saw yet again another article about open source in other countries. Why do I care? because China, Japan and Korea (IIRC) are developing their own official distribution of linux. Germany is implementing a linux conversion of a whole bunch of machines. I see one of these every few months for another country. Even the state of Mass has recently passed legislation stating that all future documents need to be done in the Open Document format (a format MS refuses to support, despite the fact that they helped design the format).