2/19    I program a lot by sshing to a Linux cluster.  So I'm used to using
        Xemacs to code.  This works fine from a Linux or Windows workstation,
        but sometimes I have to use a Mac.  On Mac, the meta is usually
        bound to option, but that often doesn't work over ssh for some reason.
        This makes using emacs a real pain.  Any suggestions on how to fix it?
        (Other than "use vi")
	...

8/26    Amazon medium instances (3.75GB RAM): 0.160/hour = $1382/year
        Generic standard Linux VPS (4GB RAM): $480/year
        Amazon costs more (but does offer superior scaling options).
        \_ Amazon is $670 if you buy a year's usage up front (heavy util).
           Why is heavy util less expensive than light util?
	...

1/4     I want to test how my servers behave during a disk failure and
        a RAID reconstruction so I want to simulate a hardware failure.
        How can I do this in Linux without having to physically pull
        a drive? These disks are behind a RAID card and run Linux. -ausman
        \_ According to the Linux RAID wiki, you might be able to use mdadm
           to do this with something like the following:
	...

9/13    Thanks to Jordan, our disk server is no longer virtualized. Our long
        nightmare of poor IO performance should hopefully be over. Prepare for
        another long nightmare of poor hardware reliability!
        ...
        Just kidding! (I hope)
        In any case, this means that cooler was taken out back and shot, and
	...

2/10    Debian 6.0 squeeze is the new stable.  Do we dare a dist-upgrade?
        \_ the key for http://security.debian.org has changed btw.
	...

7/21    Can I just use ifconfig to expand my netmask on a FreeBSD box?
        Are there any gotchas here? Linux forces me to restart my network
        to expand my netmask.
        \_ yes... and no, you don't have to restart your network on linux either
           \_ Rebooting is the Ubootntoo way!
              \_ Oooboot'n'tootin!
	...

7/22    Playing with dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/<disk> on linux and bsd:
        2 questions, on linux when <disk>==hda it always gives me this off
        by one report i.e. Records out == records in-1 and says there is an
        error. Has anyone else seen this?  Second, when trying to repeat this
        on bsd, <disk>==rwd0 now, to my surprise, using the install disk and
        selecting (S)hell, when I try to dd a 40 gig disk it says "409 records
	...

5/26    anyone use lxde?  supposedly it is less stupid than xfce and
        less bloated than gnome.  thoughts?
        \_ lol, does anyone still use desktop linux?  Get with the times
           buy a mac.  Now.  DO IT.  Go NOW.
           \_ but we prefer herring to Kool-Aid
              \_ "you have to yell, he's hard of herring"
	...

9/20    How do I change my shell? chsh says "Cannot change ID to root."
        \_ /usr/bin/chsh does not have the SUID permission set. Without
           being set, it does not successfully change a user's shell.
           Typical newbie sys admin (on soda)
           \_ Actually, it does: -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 37552 Feb 15  2011 /usr/bin/chsh
	...

9/24    How come changing my shell using ldapmodify (chsh doesn't work) doesn't
        work either? ldapsearch and getent show the new shell but I still get
        the old shell on login.
        \_ Scratch that, it magically took my new shell now. WTF?
           \_ probably nscd(8)
	...

4/27    I wrote a little shell script to collect iostat data:
        #!/bin/bash
        DATE=`date +%m%d`
        DATADIR=/var/tmp/user
        OUTPUTFILE=$DATADIR/$DATE.out
        while true
	...

5/8     Hello everyone!  This is Josh Hawn, CSUA Tech VP for Spring 2012.
        About 2 weeks ago, someone brought to my attention that our script
        to periodically merge /etc/motd.public into /etc/motd wasn't
        running.  When I looked into it, the cron daemon was running, but
        there hadn't been any root activity in the log since April 7th.  I
        looked into it for a while, but got lost in other things I was
	...

2/9     Reminder: support for mail services has been deprecated for *several
        years*. Mail forwarding, specifically .forward mail forwarding, is
        officially supported and was never deprecated.
        \_ There is no .forward under ~root.  How do we mail root and how do
           we get responses?
           \_ root@csua.berkeley.edu is and always has been an alias.
	...

9/12    We've restored CSUA NFS to something vaguely resembling normal
        functionality -- plus, with some luck, we should now have something
        vaguely resembling normal uptime, too!  Ping root@csua.org if you
        notice any problems.  --jordan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \_  Oh, and http://irc.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU is online again.
	...

10/24  What's an easy way to see if say column 3 of a file matches a list of
       expressions in a file? Basically I want to combine "grep -f <file>"
       to store the patterns and awk's $3 ~ /(AAA|BBB|CCC)/ ... I realize
       I can do this with "egrep -f " and use regexp instead of strings, but
       was wondering if there was some magic way to do this.
       \_ UNIX has no magic. Make a shell script to produce the ask or egrep
	...

6/5     In an effort to stabilize our services, we'll be rebuilding parts of
        the CSUA infrastructure over the course of this summer.  To give us
        some wiggle room, I've temporarily decreased soda's allocated RAM from
        8GB to 2GB.  If you need to run something that requires large amounts
        of memory, please send mail to root@csua.org and we'll try to
        accommodate your request.  --jordan
	...

4/28    Will wall be fixed?   - jsl
        \_ What's wall?
           \_ An anachronism from a bygone era, when computers were hard to
              comeby, the dorms didn't have net, there was no airbears, and
              when phones didn't come standard with twitter or sms.
           \_ A non useful implementation of twitter.
	...