Archive
Posts from 2011
An amazing hot swap drive tray
I'm constantly playing around with Operating Systems and applications, and in the vast majority of cases I can use VirtualBox, KVM or VMWare to accomplish my testing. But in some cases I need to use physical hardware, which used to require me to shuffle drives and cables around in my custom built rack mount servers. Well, no more. I picked up a couple of SNT hot swap drive trays and now I can easily swap drives in and out of my rack mount servers…
$ read more →Growing your own lettuce indoors with an Aerogarden
I've hopped on the health train over the past six months, and have been trying to integrate more fruits and vegetables into my diet. This all came about after I watched the Food Inc. documentary (available from Netflix and Amazon's streaming services) and reflected on what I eat. The Food Inc…
$ read more →Configuring wget to use a proxy server
Periodically I need to download files on servers that aren't directly connected to the Internet. If the server has wget installed I will usually execute it passing it the URL of the resource I want to retrieve: If the system resides behind a proxy server the http_proxy variable needs to be set to the server name and port of the proxy: If your proxy requires a username and password you can pass those on the command line: Or you can set the proxy-user and proxy-password variables in your ~/.wgetrc file.
$ read more →Four super cool utilities that are part of the psmisc package
There are a ton of packages available for the various Linux distributions. Some of these packages aren't as well know as others, though they contain some crazy awesome utilities. One package that fits into this cataegory is psmisc. Psmisc contains several tools that be used to print process statistics, look at file descriptor activity, see which process ids have a file or directory open, kill all processes that match a pattern and print the process table as a tree…
$ read more →Figuring out how long a Linux process has been alive
I've bumped into a few problems in the past where processes that were supposed to be short lived encountered an issue and never died. Over time these processes would build up and if it wasn't for a cleanup task I developed the process table would have eventually filled up (the bug that caused this was eventually fixed). Now how would you go about checking to see how long a process has been alive? There are actually several ways to get the time a process started on a Linux host…
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