| ||||||
| 5/16 |
| 2013/10/24-11/21 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54749 Activity:nil |
9/18 -------------------------
< Less wine, more sudo. >
-------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| || |
| 2013/4/30-5/10 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54666 Activity:nil |
4/30 17:34 <xxx@xxx02:~ $ > uptime
17:34:40 up 19:10, 2 users, load average: 1117.31, 1106.06, 1074.05 |
| 2013/3/24-5/18 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54638 Activity:nil |
3/24 How are people transferring large files to one other person these days?
When I need to send some videos to my parents, I upload them to
my SpiderOak account, but they don't have anything like that,
so I'm not sure how to get videos from them. Does DropBox do this
for free?
\_ DropBox +
\_ ftp upload to soda, http download from soda, delete file on soda.
\_ USB Thumbdrive
\_ files? are we in 1990? everyone uses YouTube. You can even set
them to be private. If you want convenience, use Picasaweb.
My goodness, I didn't know people still transferred files.
\_ It might not seem to be a good idea to pass on family memories
to later generations in the form of a YouTube link.
\_ It might not be a good idea to pass on family memories to later
generations in the form of a YouTube link. |
| 2012/9/24-11/7 [Computer/SW/Languages, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54484 Activity:nil |
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) |
| 2012/9/20-11/7 [Computer/SW/Unix, Finance/Investment] UID:54482 Activity:nil |
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 |
| 2012/8/30-11/7 [Computer/SW/Apps, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54470 Activity:nil |
8/30 Is wall just dead? The wallall command dies for me, muttering
something about /var/wall/ttys not existing.
\_ its seen a great drop in usage, though it seems mostly functional.
-ERic
\_ Couldn't open wall log!: Bad file descriptor
Could not open wall subscription directory /var/wall/ttys: No such file or directory
\_ In theory, wall could be used as a sort of irc system, but maybe it's just fallen
apart.
Could not open wall subscription directory /var/wall/ttys: No such
file or directory
\_ In theory, wall could be used as a sort of irc system, but maybe
it's just fallen apart. |
| 2012/7/11-8/19 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54435 Activity:nil |
7/11 Story of the first image on the web:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/cwf2ld2 [motherboard.vice.com]
\_ It might be the first image available via HTTP all right, but people
have been downloading GIF's via FTP long before that. I still
remember files like sigirl5.gif and dadygirl.gif back in 1990.
(NSFW, of course.)
\_ Remember SFTP?
\_ Yeah, and? -- PP |
| 2012/7/2-8/19 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54429 Activity:nil |
7/2 If I download a software that has GNU GPL and create a search
engine on top of it and the search engine profits (and I don't
release the source code nor do I modify or redistribute it), is
that an acceptable use of GNU GPL?
\_ Yes. Even the AGPL allows this if you don't modify the program.
\_ What if I'm a search engine that uses something that uses
GNU GPL and I modify it for the company's infrastructure
like Borg or GFE or BigTable but never release it to the
world, is that acceptable use?
\_ Yes. http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic |
| 2012/5/8-6/4 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54383 Activity:nil |
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
working on (Studying for finals and what-not).
Anyway, I decided to look into it again today and just restarted
the crond daemon using:
`/etc/init.d/cron restart`
And it seems to be working now. Sorry for the inconvenience. I
should have noticed that I wasn't getting any cron daemon emails
from soda for so long. Please continue to enjoy using motd.
Sorry for the service interruption.
\_ Thank you Josh! Are you guys still giving out awesome
@csua.berkeley.edu mailing addresses so that future alum
like yourself can enjoy perks like Amazon Prime
for students?
\_ I was able to use this account to sign up for FB
before the masses, what other perks have you seen?
\_ Ah that'd explain why my (cron based) motd archiver was broken too.
-ERic |
| 2012/4/27-6/4 [Computer/SW/Languages/Misc, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54372 Activity:nil |
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
do
date; /usr/bin/iostat -x 1 > $OUTPUTFILE
done
Is there a better way to do this? Open source tool perhaps?
\_ It's the easiest way. If you want to go fancy, Graphite is
pretty nice for app level stuff.
\_ Wow, this Graphite?
http://graphite.wikidot.com
Do you have it installed? |
| 2012/2/9-3/26 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54305 Activity:nil |
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.
root@csua.org will reach rootstaff when csua.b.e is down, and
is the preferred contact.
\_ Why is there still a 1.4TB volume mounted on /var/mail?
\_ Because it's currently slightly less work to leave it as-is than
to figure out how to migrate cleanly and smoothly. Email isn't
something you just switch off one day.
\_ I don't think I ever saw an announcement on this. Anyone have
a copy for the rest of us to read?
\_ http://preview.tinyurl.com/7bghw8h -ausman |
| 2012/1/27-3/26 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54299 Activity:nil |
1/27 Interesting list of useful unix tools. Shout out to
cowsay even!
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/3428AB/kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools
\_ This is nice. Thanks. |
| 2011/11/20-2012/2/6 [Computer/Companies/Apple, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54237 Activity:nil |
11/20 Are there tools that can justify a chunk of plain ASCII text by
replacing words with words of similar meaning and inserting/removing
commas into the text? I received a 40-line plain text mail where
all the lines are justified on left and right. Every word and comma
is followed by only one space, and every period is followed by two
spaces. The guy is my kid's karate instructor which I don't think is
a computer guy. The mail header reads "X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.936)"
which I don't think does this either. Thx.
\_ This is sort of uberkerning, which is probably beyond the
ability of machines. Are you sure he didn't just do it by hand?
How long is the message?
\_ I don't know if he did it by hand, but who would manually do
such a thing? (I've shot mail to him asking about it and am
waiting for a reply.) The text is 40 lines. I saved the whole
text in /tmp/justified_mail.txt.
\_ Ummm, OCD perhaps? This is pretty odd, thanks for sharing.
\_ Maybe he used groff? Looks kind of like a manpage.
\_ Got words from the sender. It turns out that he indeed
did it by hand. Amazing. Thanks for all the responses.
\_ can you ask him if he has OCD? Does he like Star Trek? |
| 2011/11/2-8 [Computer/SW/Languages/Perl, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54208 Activity:nil |
11/2 Celebrating fifty days of uptime!
00:16:58 up 50 days, 19 min, 13 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
\_ Thanks, jordan!
\_ I would bitch about the 1, but it is not like anyone else is
trying to do anything resource intensive with soda.
\_ The culprit:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
25757 edilaic 20 0 32088 4284 2052 R 100 0.1 21565:48 perl
\_ Yeah I saw that too, but it is not like he is slowing anyone
else down. This is some kind of irc bot, right?
\_ rodney on irc.csua/#hosers -- it announces nethack deaths. |
| 2011/10/26-12/6 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54202 Activity:nil |
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
you're looking for and there's your wizardry right there.
\- re: magic: there are sometimes (relatively) obscure commands
which do something slightly more painful to do with lower
level tools, e.g. comm, jot, paste, join, tac, sort -M. I didnt
know about 'grep -L' until maybe 5yrs ago, and would figure
out how to do that in (relatively) painful ways. |
| 5/16 |
| 2011/9/14-21 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54174 Activity:nil |
9/13 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do
eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. |
| 2011/9/14-12/28 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54172 Activity:nil |
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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 2011/4/27-7/30 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54096 Activity:nil |
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.
\_ Much like twitter itself
\_ Sounds like your peer group doesn't use twitter.
\_ Twitter isn't as interactive as wall was; it's
micro-blogging, not chat. And most of it sucks.
#likethetagsforexample -tom
\_ Some groups get really chatty, and being able to
use it over mobile devices is really useful for
on the spot hive-mind decisions. (where are we
going to eat now? what bar are we meeting at,
what did we change our minds about eating etc).
My only complaint is that long links are almost
always shortened, so be careful what you click on
(but that's pretty much the web these days). Clearly
YMMV based on your circle, as with all "groupware".
\_ AGAIN, we don't know *how* to fix it, because no current student and
no or few alumni for several years have ever used it regularly. If
you want it fixed, we're willing to do it, but nut up and offer your
help. Sorry, I've had a bad day. --toulouse (I'm on root)
\_ I'd rather you guys focus time on providing non-duplicable
services to the UCB _undergrad_ community at large (eg, focus on
usenet, actual student help, etc) than attempt to reimplement
functionality that is done do death by a Free Web App like
twitter (or any of the social nets out there). And again thanks
for keeping soda up and around.
\_ can you post the root password on motd please? Thanks.
\_ vahmifqy -- you're welcome
\_ Is this all it takes? I did one of the last major rewrites of
'wall', I think all that is broken right now is its logging and
log rotation -ERic (mehlhaff) |
| 2011/4/6-20 [Computer/SW/Mail, Computer/SW/Unix, Industry/Startup] UID:54078 Activity:nil |
4/6 My company is evaluating version control systems. Our two candidates
are Perforce and Subversion. Anyone worked with both and have good
arguments one way or the other? (These are the only two options we
have.) We're most interested in client performance, ease of use, and
reasonable branching.
\_ I'll be 'that guy'. If perforce and subversion are optins, why isn't
git? Having not used perforce, I can't say much about it, but svn is
grossly insufficient for my branching and checkpointing needs. I
cannot use svn anymore without git-svn.
\_ svn+trac = nice. git-svn+trac = OH THE HORROR.
\_ Corporate standards. (Yes, it's a stupid reason.) -op
\_ In what way is svn insufficient for your branching needs? All of
the claims I see about svn not supporting branching well predate
the merge support added in svn 1.5. I've not used svn and so am
not able to tell to what extent that merge support works.
\_ I have used P4win and the mods P4py and what not. I thought they
wre great at core focus, but lousy at being customizeable. You will
probably go with Perforce tho since the app looks nice on winboxen.
git for windows is knida amateur looking.
\_ There is also P4-Emacs at http://p4el.sourceforge.net which
I've used for a few years. -- yuen
\_ State your eng size. This will be one of the most decisive factors.
Perforce for 5 employees? FORGET IT.
Subversion for 1000 employees? FORGET IT.
\_ Try bugzilla on 1000 employees. Ugh. the horror.
I've used p4, svn, and git. All have advantages and disadvantages.
Use the wrong tool for the wrong size, you'll be bitching all the way.
What people don't realize is that there is something else much more
important than what you use-- a code-review process.
\_ We are a group of about 50 developers right now, with plans to
expand in the coming years and to manage more of our internal
tools through version control.
We do code reviews, although we're currently re-evaluating our
tool choices there as well. Our options are Crucible and Code
Collaborator. -op
\_ Go with SVN. You sound like small shop. |
| 2011/2/18-4/20 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54044 Activity:nil |
2/18 Why does the system seem so sluggish lately?
\_ Slow NFS is basically always the answer. --toulouse
\_ Any truth to the rumor that soda will be decommissioned this summer?
\_ Absolutely none. Soda might go down temporarily while disks are
reorganized and stuff so soda doesn't suffer from such shitty
performance nearly as much, but no, we've gotta maintain NFS and
mail anyways, so there's no sense in shutting soda down.
--toulouse
\_ Cool.
\_ I thought you guys were proposing moving soda offa nfs and
removing mail except for .forwards?
\_ Correct. Soda would be moved off of NFS. We still need NFS
for other things though. And 'removing mail except for
.forwards' still constitutes a maintenance effort wrt/
keeping things running. --toulouse
\_ To clarify - this is what is proposed. Receiving mail on
CSUA systems (as opposed to forwarding it from CSUA->
whatever your .forward specifies) is merely deprecated.
--toulouse |
| 2011/2/14-4/20 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54039 Activity:nil |
2/14 You sure soda isn't running windows in disguise? It would explain the
uptimes.
\_ hardly, My winbox stays up longer.
\_ Nobody cares about uptime anymore brother, that's what web2.0 has
taught us. Everything is "stateless".
\_ You;d think gamers would care more about uptime.
\_ why do you think i suggested they run a private wow server
on the side, it would give them impetus to care about
stability
\_ Seriously?! Have you ever browsed web 2.0 sites without cookies?
\_ This ploy to confuse state-passed-into-client vs state-kept
-by-server in a discussion about _server_ issues has been
ignored. lern2troll plz.
\_ Seriously? You are confusing client and server?
\_ Soda is not the problem. NFS is. We mount NFS from an OpenSolaris
box hosting ZFS. We don't have the money to get a proper filer to
get stuff running smoothly, so we're thinking of moving user data
local to soda so that the NFS server, which is slightly incompatible
or something, and prone to shitting bricks, won't be such a problem.
However, the people capable of doing this, as well as the
possibility of downtime of services such as usenetwhich we provide
to the campus, means this'll have to happen at the end of the
semester (May/June). Also a problem is that the CSUA doesn't have
a whole lot of IPs, so we bottleneck through a server which will
cut off access to most other services if it goes down, as it uses pf
to direct traffic on certain ports to certain internal VMs with only
internal IPs. --toulouse
\_ OpenSolaris; is that in danger of going away? I thought oracle
end of life'd it?
\_ P.S. We care about the uptime that students and professors
rely on. Please don't paint us as being careless and incapable.
--toulouse
\_ I don't have OpenSolaris experience but I've used ZFS on FreeBSD
for a file server, and it's been very reliable. --jwm
\_ So did we. If you ever have heavy load under multiple users,
brace yourself for frequent kernel panics. Also, FreeBSD ZFS
is ages behind OpenSolaris's, though TBH with Oracle eating
Sun, added to our issues with our disk server's uptime,
OpenSolaris and ZFS as a whole aren't looking all that
attractive for continued use. --toulouse
\_ FreeBSD's ZFS does lag behind, but it's plenty functional
for what I've done. I can give up some of the new
functionality to have stability. --jwm
\_ No, no, what I was saying is that under load, FreeBSD's
crashed *a lot* when we were running NFS+ZFS on it.
Not that OpenSolaris has been a party either, but I
personally don't think that NFS+ZFS is a winning combo
for stability if you're looking for a free solution.
P.S. your tabs are wrong. Note the locations of tabs.
--toulouse
\_ If FreeBSD crashes that means you aren't running the
quality hardware.
\_ I doubt that. I don't remember the details but I
think this also happened in VMs? In any case, if
we could get good hardware a filer would be nice.
--toulouse
\_ Among other implementations (including
Netapp) I run NFS on a Thumper using ZFS
and it is very stable with 150 users who
are actuall doing things. I think
something is wrong with your hardware or
your config.
\_ That may very well be so. But the only one
who maintained our ZFS+NFS setup seriously
graduated a while ago, and there's not a
lot of interest in maintaining a finicky
setup in the absence of time and money,
when that time could be used more
effectively on class and other stuff. --t |
| 2010/12/13-2011/2/19 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53978 Activity:nil |
12/21 Help, all my files are owned by nobody! -ausman
(yes I emailed root)
\_ Things should be fine now. As usual, the NFS server caused a cascade
of errors. |
| 2010/11/18-2011/1/13 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53990 Activity:nil |
11/18 ncurses header files are missing..
\_ Installed. FYI I find it rude that you wouldn't bother to mail root
and instead complain here, perhaps hoping that someone with root
might check. I might not have root forever, you know, and I don't
think many root staff typically check here. --toulouse
P.S. the specific library installed was libncurses5-dev. If you ask
for something else please do it through root@csua. |
| 2010/8/9-19 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53915 Activity:nil |
8/9 Who is this guy 42949672? Posted some root's processes for context.
751 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 1 0.0 0:24.50 rpciod/0
5293 42949672 20 0 20412 908 576 S 0 0.0 0:18.82 nrpe
1 root 20 0 10312 748 620 S 0 0.0 0:08.75 init
\_ Sounds like -1 (a truncated 4294967295). |
| 2010/5/17-6/11 [Science/GlobalWarming, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53828 Activity:nil |
5/18 did somebody say tar ball?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/tar-balls-key-west_n_579660.html
anyone else wishing we could just gzip these? |
| 2010/5/4-26 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53816 Activity:nil |
5/3 Is it possible to bzip2 on the fly? Like:
% dump_stuff | bzip2 -stdin > dump_file.bz2
\_ Yup, it works fine. You don't even need a flag:
% dump_stuff | bzip2 > dump_file.bz2
\_ whoa, why didn't anyone tell me about this, and why is this
not on the man page. I've been doing the stupid command
for years:
% mysqldump > f.sql; bzip2 f.sql
\_ "If no file names are specified, bzip2 compresses
from standard input to standard output." |
| 2010/3/8-30 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53745 Activity:nil |
3/8 I have a mod_rewrite question that I think should be straight-
forward but I think I'm not getting something.
I have a virtual server with some root, say /home/user/public_html/
and in there I have two subdirs, say /app1/ and /app2/
and i want the following:
http://mysite/app1 --> /home/user/public_html/app1
http://mysite/(.* --> /home/user/public_html/app2/$1
so for ex, http://mysite/app2 --> /home/user/public_html/app2/app2
So anything that's not "app1" would map into the app2 subdir ...
but I guess this causes an infinite loop in the processing? Since it
just keeps prefixing /app2/ onto the path until it crashes? any
advice? thx -
\_ IIRC it matches in order. However, the way you have it, it looks like
http://mysite/app1 or http://mysite/app1/(.* might not be matched by
your first rule. Perhaps "http://mysite/app1(/.*)?" or something may
work better (untested though, but you should get the idea)
\_ ok sure you're right. But my main question is how to get the
2nd rule to work w/out generating an infinite loop. ie,
http://mysite should go to home/user/public_html/app2/
http://mysite/foo should go to home/user/public_html/app2/foo
http://mysite/app2 should go to home/user/public_html/app2/app2
etc, but w/out infinite loop. possible? thx
\_ Oh, I see. You probably want
http://mysite/app2 -> /home/user/public_html/app2/
as a separate rule, or perhaps...
http://mysite/([^/]*)(/.*?) -> /home/user/public_html/app2/$1$2
...maybe? I don't know why it would be rewriting it to a path on
your filesystem...it's been a while, but I thought it rewrote
URLs, not filesystem paths. I'm just guessing...
\_ set your root to app2. then alias /app1. no mod_rewrite.
\_ hurr durr that would make too much sense. D'oh. --!op |
| 2010/1/22-24 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53654 Activity:high |
1/22 What's the difference between a job and a career?
\_ women have jobs, men have careers.
\_ true statement but one that is sexist and should be
kept in a private conversation
\_ A job could be anything that pays mortgage or feed the mouth.
A career is something that is longer term, most of the time,
something you do out of choice. People who clean toilets have
a job. People who have a chance to climb corporate ladders
have a career.
\_ Most people have only one career path in their whole lifetime. Few
people have two or more. Most people have several jobs in their
lifetime. For example, a person can have jobs and careers like
these:
Job 1: software engineer
Job 2: senior software engineer
Job 3: flipping burgers at McDonald's because he got laid off at #2.
Job 4: software architect
Job 5: flipping burgers at McDonald's because now he likes flipping
burgers
Job 6: supervisor at McDonald's
Job 7: Owner of a McDonald's restaurant.
That translates to
Career 1: software engineering (Jobs 1-4)
Career 2: fast food business (Jobs 5-7)
Job 3 is not a career switch because he considered it a temporary
job. |
| 2009/12/9-2010/1/13 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53586 Activity:nil |
12/8 Is there a bash equivalent to tcsh's history-search-backward ?
\_ There's something similar called... history-search-backward. It
is a bit more limited, in that it only searches for strings and
not glob patterns. You may find reverse-i-search to be useful also. |
| 2009/11/13-30 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53523 Activity:nil |
11/12 How does one find out if a system has rootkit installed?
\_ Unix or m$?
\_ Unix. On M$ I always assume it's compromised.
\_ Install Tripwire before you plug your server into The Net?
The only other answer I can think of is to reinstall the
OS from scratch on another server and do an md checksum
comparison with your current binaries. You can also look
for other signs of infection, like open ports that don't
belong there (netstat -o), mysteriously growing filesystems,
etc, but a really good rootkit is almost undetectable. Most
of them aren't really good though.
\_ ObKenThompson:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html |
| 2009/10/27-11/3 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53475 Activity:nil |
10/27 http://www.maxgames.com/play/flash-mind-reader.html how does this work? \_ sh -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j-(\ $i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq \_ bash -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j\ -($i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq \_ ksh -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j-\ ($i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq \_ fixd. above script only works if your sh is really bash. -Solaris Geek \_ sorry, I somehow lost the k. Also, works if your sh is ksh93 in opensolaris, etc. Not sure that putback has made it into s10u* \- i thought that was pretty clever presentation. thanks for sharing the link. |
| 2009/10/1-12 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53416 Activity:nil |
10/1 I typed man ls on soda and didn't get a man page. How can
I fix this?
\_ I have this line in my .cshrc:
setenv MANPATH "/usr/man:/usr/local/man:/usr/X11/man:/csua/man:/usr/share/man"
setenv MANPATH "/usr/man:/usr/local/man:/usr/X11/man:/csua/man:
/usr/share/man"
(I don't even remember whether it came with my account or I added
it myself.)
\_ it worked. thank you. |
| 2009/9/18-29 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix, Finance/Investment] UID:53379 Activity:nil |
9/18 In Linux, is there a way for root to change the "nice" value of an
existing process? thx.
\_ Yes. man renice. |
| 2009/9/10-21 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53354 Activity:low |
9/10 Is there a web site out there that I can put in a URL and it
comes back with an estimated monthly traffic, for free? I tried
going to Comscore but I can't find it.
\_ <DEAD>www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_details#siteDetails?identifier=cnn.com&geo=US&trait_type=1&lp=false<DEAD>
\_ check the differences between:
http://gop.com and http://democrats.org
\_ Do you know about Alexa?
\_ Alexa charges an arm and a leg for detailed data. Fuck that
\_ It is the best free summary stats I have found. Let me know
if you find something better (that is free).
\_ Yes. Google Ad Planner is free and BETTER. Check
it out and let me know what you think.
\_ Alexa is free, too, for basic info. The Google stuff
looks interesting, but its UU info for where I work
(CNET) is way off. Look at the daily unique user count
and the monthy numbers. There is no way for this to
add up.
\_ http://www.quantcast.com or http://www.compete.com |
| 2009/9/5-12 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53337 Activity:nil |
9/5 Almost to 10 days uptime! Woo!
\_ Back down to 10 hours... :( |
| 2009/8/21-9/1 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53297 Activity:nil |
8/20 When I use rsync to backup, it's pretty cool except in cases where
I rename a directory name from the source. Rsync will just do
a plain copy. Is there a program that'll detect renaming of
directories (by checking for children files), or at least
move them to a dated directory?
\_ Not related but beware of using rsync as a backup tool.
Consider using something like rsnapshots instead.
\_ what's wrong with rsync?
\_ Same reason why RAID is not a backup. If, out of
user error, you delete a file then it's gone in
both the original and the backup. Combine
rsnapshots with rsync and you'll have a better
backup solution. This way, you'll retain some
history so you can recover files later on.
\_ rsync has a --backup option to move unsync'ed
files into a backup directory. Did you miss that?
\_ try this:
% sync --backup-dir=._090821 --suffix='' --delete -avrb \
--filter='merge /Users/username/.rsync-filter' \
src dest
My rule in .rsync-filter excludes ._* names.
This will move files into ._090821 so that dest==src
\_ Huh? Use --delete to make an exact replica on the destination.
\_ --delete will delete files that you may need later on, that's
the point of a backup. Make sure to use --backup in
conjunction with --delete. |
| 2009/8/19-9/1 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53285 Activity:nil |
8/18 Hi again, new freebsd guy here again, in bash I was able to go
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/foo/lib ./runmyapp
I managed to do this in tcsh by using setenv in a shell script
that setenv's the lib path and then executes $1, just wondering
if there was a way to do it in 1 line from the cmd line as in bash?
Thanks, btw %2c or %3c worked. Freebsd, tcsh and vi forever!
Go Bears!
\_ env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/foo/lib ./runmyapp
\_ aha! i was using that but with set instead of env, and once
with setenv. I shoulda tried env, thanks!! |
| 2009/8/18-9/1 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53284 Activity:nil |
8/18 Is it possible to truncate your path name in your prompt in tcsh?
Tsch veterans REPRESENT! I know this is how to do it in bash:
# truncate path: returns $1 truncated to $2 chars, prefixed with ...
truncate_path () {
if [ -z "$1" -o -z "$2" ]
then
echo Usage: truncate_path path length
return 1
fi
if [ ${#1} -le $2 ]
then
echo $1
else
local offset=$(( ${#1} - $2 + 3 ))
echo "...${1:$offset:$2}"
fi
}
But I'd rather use tcsh on my freebsd machine. Go Bill Joy and BEARS!!
\_ %c2 |
| 2009/8/2-11 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53229 Activity:nil |
8/1 What keeps hapening to soda? load of O(1000) then crash? Is it
still nfs, even past the new kernel we did just for nfs?
\_ It's still NFS. Filer plz kthxbai.
\_ Filer eliminates NFS? |
| 2009/7/28-9/24 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53215 Activity:nil |
7/28 Restored basic website functionality. I also killed user websites,
because I think the new root staff had set up the website with a
default config and were not aware they were enabled. Sorry if this
causes inconvenience, hopefully they will be restored soon once
the website is taken in hand. -mrauser |
| 2009/7/22-27 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53181 Activity:nil |
7/22 Why does everyone's 'mail last read' date say Jul 19th? even for people
who don't log in (shell is safesorry)? Just wondering O mighty unix
gurus.
\_ Modification time change when it was copied to new soda. |
| 2009/7/8-16 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53124 Activity:nil |
7/7 what happened to our web presence? http://www.csua.berkeley.edu not working \_ That would be because we've yet to set them up afaik. Steven *does* have a job after all. The idea is that we want a separate computer mounting the web directories, so that if an exploit compromises the webserver, the shell server (soda) itself will be insulated from the attack. \_ That would be because we've yet to set them up afaik. Steven *does* have a job after all. The idea is that we want a separate computer mounting the web directories, so that if an exploit compromises the webserver, the shell server (soda) itself will be insulated from the attack. \_ Ideally I wouldn't be the only one doing this shit :-p --steven \_ understood. I can help out. What's the root password? \_ can you install Lift? Word in the radlab is that it's the new sexy hotness. http://liftweb.net \_ Not a debian package. Can you install it locally? |
| 2009/7/6-16 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53117 Activity:nil |
7/6 Soda is having nfs problems, sorry about the up/downtime.
I'll be monitoring it and seeing if I can figure out why
it keeps choking; but NFS is somewhat of a (broken) black
box... :/ --steven |
| 2009/6/30-7/15 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53101 Activity:nil |
6/30 Thanks very much for all the volunteer work on soda! Two questions:
1. When will HTTP be up again?
\_ Probably not this week - 4th and all that. Next week?
2. There used to be a web page that describes the historical hardware
for soda machine. What's the URL again? I forgot.
\_ It's on the wiki now -
http://wiki.csua.berkeley.edu/index.php/Hardware
Not up to date with the most recent rev yet
Thanks again. |
| 2009/6/24-7/3 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53082 Activity:nil |
6/24 Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Ahoy there weary traveler - This is indeed the brand spanking new Soda. We'll be enabling logins again soon - just want to make sure all the infrastructure is in place and ready for everyone to hammer on it. Please direct questions to politburo@csua.berkeley.edu Best, CSUA Root Staff |
| 2009/5/31-6/4 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:53061 Activity:nil |
5/30 What's the best way to convert BMP to PDF? I'm tired of a bunch of
PC shareware that has limitations. I'd prefer UNIX way but don't
know where to start, and Google hasn't been helpful.
\_ Imagemagick ("convert"). -tom |
| 2009/5/7-14 [Computer/Networking, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52962 Activity:nil |
5/7 What's a good reverse port forwarding for a PC(inside firewall) ->
Unix, so that I can VNC into the Unix that gets forwarded to
PC's VNC server?
\_ http://micrux.net/?p=26
Syntax, to be executed from the PC behind firewall:
% ssh -R 5900:127.0.0.1:5901 <destination_server>
You can also use Putty, by going to Connections->SSH->Tunnels,
and enter:
Source port:5900
Destination:127.0.0.1:5901
Remote (not Local)
and finally click on Add
So the connectivity looks like this:
PC --ssh--> FIREWALL --ssh--> destination_server
And the resulting "virtual" connectivity:
PC:5900 <--- destination_server:5901
With the "-R" argument the destination_server binds to
port 5901 which will connect back to PC's port 5900. Hence, it's
a "reverse" tunnel. Note that this can potentially open up
a lot of problems for companies and is generally frowned
upon by network administrators. Please use with care.
\_ Thanks, this is super useful info in general.
\_ I do this with inetd and netcat. Just put a line like this in
/etc/inetd.conf, and reload inetd:
5900 stream tcp nowait nobody /bin/nc nc YOUR-PC 5900
You can also do it with ssh port forwarding (e.g. using PuTTY),
but then you have to remember to keep your ssh connection open
all the time. |
| 2009/5/6-9 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52953 Activity:nil |
5/6 When I finger my account, it says:
New mail received Wed May 6 07:13 2009 (PDT)
Unread since Mon May 4 08:43 2009 (PDT)
Acutally I haven't accessed my mail for several months, why does
finger say unread since 5/4?
\_ stop fingering yourself
\_ Pretty sure it says that for everyone. Finger says that because mail
was catastrophically hosed this weekend and steven spent a great
deal of time moving us over from exim4 to postfix, while preserving
your mail. Also in doing so he moved NFS to NFS4 on our new disk
server, so stability should be better in the short term and much
better in the long term. --t |
| 2009/5/5-6 [Computer/SW/SpamAssassin, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52948 Activity:moderate |
5/4 Is mail still down? I don't seem to be getting any and vermouth
is unavailable. I saw a note saying it was down Sunday, but it's
almost Tuesday now.
\_ exim4 decided it wanted to just die. With the same config file and
everything. Steven spent all weekend and a lot of yesterday migrating
to a VM. A side effect is that NFS is now no longer on Keg, so crashy
keg will no longer be a problem. There might still be a few hiccups with
getting NFS4 working, though. At this point I believe we're just waiting
for EECS to unblock the port on the firewall for the new machine doing
mail. We're now using postfix. --t
keg will no longer be a problem. There might still be a few hiccups
with getting NFS4 working, though. At this point I believe we're just
waiting for EECS to unblock the port on the firewall for the new
machine doing mail. We're now using postfix. --t
\_ damn, and I'm eager to start processing my 4500 spam messages. -ERic
\_ well, clearly the email is still coming in. Its up to 4900 spams.
-ERic
\_ damn, and I'm eager to start processing my 4900 spam messages. -ERic
\_ who fixed your 80 column issue? SODA is time-frozen, you know? |
| 2009/4/27-5/4 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52913 Activity:nil |
4/27 Git, Darcs, or Mecurial?
\_ If you do not need and will not want anyone on Windows, Git is OK.
I'm partial to Mercurial, since it's simple, and doesn't pollute
my directories with .svn, it just has a top-level .hg directory.
I hear darcs is good if you want to allow multiple people editing
the same file, since you can merge different changes within a file. |
| 2009/4/18-23 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52870 Activity:nil |
4/17 To those who have a twitter account and also follow people: how do you use
twitter to read others' tweets? do you just visit their individual
pages or do you stay logged in and visit http://twitter.com/home ? Thanks.
/home:
indiv pages: .
\_ aren't you supposed to receive updates on your cell phone? |
| 2009/4/7-13 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52814 Activity:low |
4/7 In unix version of irc (irssi), how do I scroll back chat buffer?
\_ page up/page down doesn't work? also try alt a/p
and /lastlog |
| 2009/3/8-17 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52685 Activity:kinda low |
3/8 I'm reading about an old exploit where someone used a buffer overflow
in a printer daemon to get "daemon privileges," which allowed them
to use another exploit on the mail delivery program to get root. I'm
not sure what daemon privileges are. Is there some set of priveleges
that most daemons run on that is higher than user but lower than root?
What are they? I've never heard this before.
\_ It used to be common to run daemons as a user named "daemon". The
daemon account doesn't have any special privileges, but if all your
daemons are running in a single account, anyone who breaks into the
account gets access to all of them. Modern systems run each daemon
as a separate user, so if you break into apache you only get access
to the "www" account or whatever.
\_ And to expound, usually these users like 'daemon' and 'apache'
are given *less privilege* than a normal user - at least to the
extent that is possible with UNIX permissions. For instance,
they have no login shell.
\_ Ok, thanks. So, I guess the idea here is that the mail delivery
program was running as daemon, but hadn't dropped root
permanently?
\_ Probably the deal was that the mail daemon had a function
which runs as root, but only allows programs running as
daemon to access it. So once you can run arbitrary code
as daemon, you can run the mail function as root. -tom |
| 2009/3/7-13 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52683 Activity:low |
3/6 Is http://www.cygwin.org a real site or a hoax? It looks different from http://www.cygwin.com and it doesn't mention the latter. Thx. \_ It looks like a mistake -- http://cygwin.org (without the "www") works, but http://www.cygwin.org gives you http://sourceware.org instead. \_ I dunno why there are no links to Cygwin 1.7 on that site. try this: http://cygwin.com/setup-1.7.exe |
| 2009/3/6-9 [Politics/Foreign/Asia/China, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52678 Activity:nil 75%like:52689 |
3/6 Chinese UNIX Museum:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/06/biography-of-the-las.html |
| 2009/3/3-5 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52671 Activity:high |
3/3/9 Happy Square Root Day
\_ This morning some guy on KCBS AM 740 was playing with this and said
something like "if you take the square root of every number, they
don't look so big anymore. For example, next week the square root
of my age is just 8. And the square root of the $838 billion
stimulus package is just $29 billion."
No wonder American kids rank last in math among industrialized
countries.
\_ i think the sqrt of his iq is also 8.
\_ Dude needs to go back to school, and age 8 seems like a good
time to learn about square roots.
\_ Huh? I don't see anything wrong with his statement.
\_ sqrt(838e9) is about 915423.
\_ I guess. sqrt(838) =~ 29. (Billion dollars) is the
units. Depends on how you look at it.
\_ Right, but you need to square root the units too,
just like sqrt(10000 m^2) = 100 m. The answer is
the same whether you consider the units to be m^2
or (10000 m^2) or whatever.
\_ I understand this, but what is the square
root of "2 dollars"? This is like asking what
is the square root of "2 cows". The original
statement said "square root of every number"
and not "square root of every quantity". You
could argue (correctly) that 838,000,000,000
is a number in itself and its root is not
29,000,000,000, but what about "838 cows"? What
is the square root of a cow? I think the key
number is 838 and not 838*(units). You have
to be pretty pedantical to not realize that.
\_ If your units are billions of dollars than
your square root units of ~ 31622 * $^(1/2).
sqrt (838) * sqrt (1,000,000,000) ~=
29 * 31622 ~=
915422
\_ 915422 *what*? Not dollars.
\_ $^(1/2) Which is 1/31622 of
(Billion $)^(1/2)
\_ Exactly, which is nonsense. So
ignore the units.
\_ If you ignore the units you can
turn it anything you want.
Sqrt($838e9) = $838e9 if my
units are "$838e9" and I've
decided units are meaningless.
\_ You have to use some common
sense here. The square root
of his age (64) is 8, not
8 (years)^1/2.
\_ But by your logic we can
make the units billions of
years, and now the the
square root of 64 is
252982.
Better example: the square root of $1 is 1 if
you are ignoring units, but the square root
of 100 pennies is 10! 100 pennies = 1 dollar
so how can those two be different.
$1 = 100c
sqrt($1) = sqrt(100c)
1 * $^(1/2) = 10 * c^(1/2)
The difference is in the units. 1 c^(1/2)
is, by definition, 1/10th of 1 $^(1/2).
\_ But what is a sqrt($)? or a sqrt(cent)?
\_ I guess you're right. Square rooting a number
independently of its unit like this makes no
sense, but it is what the original statement
said, and really it doesn't sound like he was
trying to make sense anyway. (FWIW, I think
sqrt("2 cows") is meaningless too, unless you
can come up with a meaning for 1.4 cow^(1/2).)
\_ Depends on how good you are at math, actually. |
| 2009/2/26-3/5 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52653 Activity:nil |
2/26 If I want to rsync a perforce or svn directory while users
are checking things in, could I wind up with a corrupted copy?
\_ sure why not. if you are really cool, your copy of the svn
repo is on LVM, and you snap the LVM to copy it.
\_ It'll seem less cool when you realize you've taken a snapshot
of a block level device, which only guarantees that this set of
blocks is not changing. It doesn't guarantee you that the
filesystem sitting on top of them is in a coherent state. What
if you were in the middle of writing a file and had only written
half of the blocks in that file when you took your block level
snapshot? You're going to need to fsck it. Go up one *more*
level to get to your source control system (and whether the set
of files being written is part of this checkin or that).
The poster below already mentioned perforce checkpoints. He's
right. In subversion you probably want to make use of
svnadmin hotcopy when backing up a repository while it's in use.
\_ Yes, you could. Checkpoint the perforce depo first and then
sync the checkpoints. There are other options, too.
\_ I usually do this in Perforce:
1. Run "p4 changes" to find the latest changelist number at that
moment. Say, 12345.
2. Run "p4 sync //...@12345". Other uses might be submitting or
might have submitted new changelists, but that's okay.
For #1, sometimes I instead get the last changelist of the previous
day, or the last changelist before the last nightly build started.
You can also do "p4 sync" by specifying a date and time. Of course,
checkpoints or labels are cleaner ways, but my company doesn't use
those. |
| 2009/2/10-13 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52552 Activity:nil |
2/10 I have an sh file that does a mount.. the mount does an
authentication. I previosly stored the username and password
from zenity prompts. However, I can't get a return on the password
field. The following only works on the username:
mount -t davfs "http://blahblah.com/BLahUser11" /mountdir << EOF
${username}
${password}
EOF
It gets stuck at the password. Any thoughts? thanks
\_ Expect?
\_ the username gets passed and a carriage return then a prompt
for the password is there but the ${password} doesnt get
put in nor carriage return. so script is stuck
\_ /usr/bin/expect
\_ can't use expect. this is an automated installer on other
persons machines. I would have to apt-get expect
No way to do it just with EOFs?
\_ would "for i in 1; do echo $username; sleep 1; \
echo $password"; done | mount -t ..." work?
It really depends on how the password is being read.
\_ that didnt work... same behavior
\_ No, this is one reason tools like Expect were invented.
See, e.g.,
http://www.noah.org/wiki/Pexpect#Q:_Why_not_just_use_a_pipe_.28popen.28.29.29.3F
\_ thanks.. i guess i have no choice :) excellent!
\_ Well, that's not to say you couldn't make a very
stripped down version of an expect-like tool
that does what you want, and ship that. Maybe
someone else has already done it.
\_ or use Perl Expect or Python Expect. |
| 2009/1/25-29 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52456 Activity:low |
1/23 may the awesome rootstaff please apt-get install:
colorgcc, colordiff, colormake
thanks!
\_ Done. In the future email such requests to root@csua for
faster response
\_ totally, understood. Altho yeah I do like asking for
it here so people can see whatup, and even comment on
the sw requests.
\_ my burning eyeballs thank you. God. how did we live without
color*, and grep -color?
\_ 640x480 amber monochrome that's how.
\_ i'm not a sysadmin.
\_ Well Played.
\_ Or apparently a very old programmer either.
Punch cards, baby!
\_ Seconded. "grep --color=always", where have you been my
whole life?
ok i just made an alias
alias grep="grep --color=always $@"
now how do i make it ignore the .svn stuff?
\_ --color-auto is probably more What You Want (tm)... fix
your termtype. as for the other part... try something
along the lines of --exclude=\*.svn\*
\_ I kind of like the post to the motd hey root thing.
Now I know someone installed colorgcc, colordiff, colormake |
| 2009/1/20-26 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52420 Activity:low |
1/20 I have a rather common shell-scripting problem, but I am not sure
how to do it in csh/tcsh. I want to check the ctime (last
modified time) of a file. If it is older than, let say, 1
hours, do something, older than 3 hours, then do something +
something else. Any hints on how to do this? do i need to
convert it to epoch to perform such manipulation? thanks
\- find or perl
\_ or stat(1)
\_ find is an excellent tool for this, especially if you have
access to a modern find. Look at the -ctime and -mmin options
to it.
\_ thanks. will work on "find." |
| 2009/1/5-8 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52313 Activity:kinda low |
1/3 no hurry but do you know of:
$ chsh
Password:
Enter the new value, or press return for the default
Login Shell [/usr/local/bin/bash]: /bin/zsh
failed: Insufficient access
\_ Yes. For now, email root@csua if you'd like to change your shell.
\_ oh i'm more interested in the how'd this happen/why, from a
system analysis/no fault point of view. was it the ldap?
\_ Yeah, it's the LDAP. sudo'ing chsh worked last time I tried
which, admittedly, was a while ago. We may just move back to
passwd and put up LDAP w/ a passwd backend. --t
\_ The underlying reason is that the way we 'sorry' people
who need to have their account disabled is by changing
their shell. If you can change your own shell, you could
connect to LDAP directly and change it to be un-sorried.
So we need to figure out a way to fix that little
loophole... that's why changing shell is disabled. As
mentioned earlier, email root@csua for shell changes. |
| 2008/12/19-28 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52283 Activity:nil |
12/19 what's your favourite unicode api for linux/unix?
\_ qt, definately. QtString::Utf8 4tw.
\_ I don't like their license. - !op
\_ anything else? |
| 2008/12/9-15 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52218 Activity:moderate 50%like:52280 |
12/9 Is there a how-to to use csua ftp service? I used to ftp to
http://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu but now I have forgotten what exactly needed to
set it up again.
\_ fixed for 80 columns.
\_ Are you trying to ftp as anonymous or as a soda user?
\_ Ask again in two weeks, when finals are over and maybe the vp can get
back to you on that. --t
\_ Ask again in two weeks, when finals are over and maybe the vp can
get back to you on that. --t
\_ You're better off emailing root@ with questions like that... |
| 2008/11/24-28 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:52090 Activity:nil |
11/23 How do you find the max # of forkable threads in a unix
environment? Is it system or user based?
\_ getrlimit, or ulimit -a (in bash) |
| 2008/11/16-17 [Computer/Networking, Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:51999 Activity:low |
11/16 Can I use my SBC Yahoo! DSL login name "xxx@sbcglobal.net" and password
for the DSL at someone else's home?
\_ Why don't you try it...
\_ Don't check your email at your mistress' house. |
| 2008/11/12-13 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:51932 Activity:nil |
11/12 May be useful if you want to learn UNIX tricks (good for noobs,
good refresher for others):
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/05/2027234
\_ that was not lol. and actually a waste of time. lol lol lol lol.
\_ waste of time. yawn. |
| 2008/10/31-11/2 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:51769 Activity:nil |
10/31 As root, is there a way to make "passwd" give the same "too short"
and other bad password errors (or at least warn in those cases)? This
is on linux. |
| 2008/10/31 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/Languages/Misc] UID:51767 Activity:high |
10/31 I guess this idiot feels so disenfranchised with the implosion
of his ideology that he has to spam completely unrelated forums
with his drivel. But since he's clearly doing it via some sort
of script, can root please block him and squish the account?
\_ Is this an example of the new liberal political order? -emarkp
\_ no, it's an example of how it's not cool to post 300 lines of
drivel to the motd. -tom
\_ what are you talking about
\_ Hey, I remember some pretty crazy shit from the lefties on the
motd back in the day. I might have even posted some of it myself... |
| 2008/10/23-28 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:51654 Activity:nil |
10/23 Woman charged with crime for "killing" (deletion really) of online
character:
http://tinyurl.com/6lspuv
\_ she is weak. SHe should have created her own character
and then do a backstab on his ass. - turin |
| 2008/10/13-16 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:51497 Activity:nil |
10/13 Can anyone recommend a decent open source software package to track
passwords in a global network (Windows+UNIX systems) ... I'm sick and
tired of waiting days for IT to track down the one person with root
on some server somewhere.
\_ its not open source, but we've been using Cyberark
(http://www.cyber-ark.com it's done the job well enough. Considering
what it cost, I bet an open source competitor would not be hard to
write... -ERic
\_ LDAP |
| 2008/10/13-15 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:51490 Activity:low |
10/12 I got sucked into doing some wedding video stuff using basically a
handheldsetup and a single finger holding down the record button.
I have imported eveerything I have on to my macbookPro and Imovie.
I would like to try to do at least some cleanup of the shakey images.
My kodak V1253 is not really designed to do viddeo clips longer than
a minute at most and i was doing closer to five. Lots of sorefingers
and wrists as a result.Any inexpensve suggestsions that will at
provide some marginal imporveent to the videos?
(* And I will try and bry a tripod with mext tme )
\_ such software does not [yet] exist but I see this as a really
amazing, obviously should have done startup idea that'd really
take off. |
| 2008/10/9 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:51447 Activity:nil |
10/8 http://www.scribd.com/doc/4964973/Worst-Captchas-of-All-Time Worst captchas of all time. Some stupid, some funny. |
| 2008/9/7-12 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/Domains] UID:51089 Activity:nil |
9/7 Dear Linux DNS experts, how do you find out if a domain has
published SPF records? Is there a magic command like hostname,
nslookup, etc that does this? I'm a UNIX noob. Thanks!
\_ host -t txt $DOMAINNAME -ERic |
| 2008/9/3 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:51030 Activity:nil |
9/3 Okay, my sed and awk skills are obviously not up to par here.
I want to only see the "500's" in my apache error log, how do I
do that? I want to see the whole line, not just the 500 error code.
Never mind, grep " 500 " is close enough. |
| 2008/8/18-21 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:50894 Activity:kinda low |
8/18 How long has the command "seq" been around? I just saw it in
one of my coworkers shell scripts and wish I had known about it
years ago...
\_ what does it do? - bash fan #1
\_ It prints out a sequence of numbers from FIRST to LAST in
a specified increment.
\_ in bash (taken from ksh, I believe), that's
for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do echo $i ; done
\_ soda:~% seq --version
seq (GNU coreutils) 5.97
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
\- you can also use jot
a hozer guidelines. Should anyone step
far enough outside the hozing boundaries
I will lobby them for the ability to squish.
-mrauser
\_ Auto-deletion directly denies access
to the motd and thus prevents the free
exchange of ideas that is necessary for
a "marketplace of ideas" to function.
Auto-posting doesn't directly deny access,
and while it may drive people away from
the motd, the motd still remains accessible.
Thus, I think that auto-deletion, in which
you don't know what you lost, is a much
worse form of terrorist, than auto-posting,
which only makes it harder to find things.
Personally, I think both auto-posting and
auto-deletion need to be controlled for
the motd to function effectively.
\_ seq shreads. I use the -w option for naming nodes in a script
for a linux cluster: for i in $(seq -w 1 200); do echo n$i; done
will give you node001-node200 |
| 2008/7/14-16 [Computer/SW/Languages/Perl, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:50557 Activity:moderate |
7/14 Shell Programming question: I want to call a script with 1 arg
and have it figure out whether $1 is a MAC address or an IP address
and then do call the appropriate function. What is the best way
to do this, given that sh/bash/ksh do not have something like
the =~ in perl. Check for exit status of grep, or is there a
a better way? For the moment, let's just say the two tests are:
echo $1 | fgrep : > /dev/null && echo isMAC || echo notMAC
echo $1 | fgrep . > /dev/null && echo isIP || echo notIP
and if neither, then Usage()
I want to avoid requiring the user to either do "-i IP" or "-m MAC".
Note: this doesn't have to do extensive syntax checking ... it's
not a security application. Just trying to save typing.
\_ You may want to recheck your assumption of bash not having =~.
\_ Thanks for that information. I didn't know know about that.
Although right now it is in sh. Any portable pure sh ideas?
I'm really interested in what is the "right" way to do this,
rather than just coming up with something which works.
\_ "right" depends on your situation. If you actually need
to support old systems, or be portable across many systems,
then maybe you should stick with sh. If you know your
audience is all going to have bash or whatever (and that
is not at all unlikely these days), then I see no good
reason to suffer under older, less capable tools.
\_ Dude, it's a sh script. If it works, it works. Seriously.
Stick it in a function if it looks too ugly and then forget
about it. If you need something to be maintainable or
it's a called enough there is any concern about it being
too slow you are going to have to bite the bullet and use
a reasonable scripting language. Otherwise just make it work
and move on to something that is worth spending time on.
\_ I think "right" in this case, means readable and maintainable
by the next poor guy that has to come along. Just document
your code and you will be fine.
\- I think one way to distill the question is "how do i get =~
in sh" ... would you do "echo $string | egrep <regexp>" + $?
to get exit status of the grep ... I think the case approach
below is nice and clean as long as you are ok with something
like *:*:*:*:*:* for MACs and *.*.*.* for IPs, and dont need
"true" regexps.
"true" regexps. I wouldnt use awk to test, but maybe if you
need to mangle.
\_ Why would you do this in a shell progam?
\_ use case:
found="NO"
case "$1" in
*:*) echo "isMAC"; found="YES";;
*.*) echo "isIP"; found="YES";;
*) if [ "$found" = "NO" ] ; then
echo "NOT MAC" ; echo "NOT IP";
fi
;;
esac |
| 2008/6/12-13 [Computer/SW/Editors/Emacs, Computer/SW/Editors/Vi, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:50233 Activity:nil |
6/12 Does emacs or vi include a column paste? I sometimes have a block
text I want to insert horizntally next to another block/column. This
is common for data plotting etc. In Microsoft Word has this, I need
it in a Unix text editor.
\_ Does M-x picture-mode in emacs work for you?
\_ Yes, with the commands below, thanks.
\_ C-x r k runs `kill-rectangle'
C-x r y runs `yank-rectangle'
\_ Does this work outside picture mode?
\_ Yes. There are quite a few other rectangle commands as well.
\_ How do you select a rectange?
\_ It's defined by point and mark. RTFM for details.
\- also valuable in emacs is align-regexp |
| 2008/6/10-13 [Computer/SW/OS/VM, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:50210 Activity:nil |
6/10 Is there a handy guide to virtualizing an already running
physical linux box into an instance of Vmware?
\_ this probably isn't the "right" way, but I have many times
just run rsync. ("rsync -vpa root@oldbox:/ /") on a fresh virtual
image. Just make sure the partitions are the same on the virt disk
as on the real disk and if you are using a new udev, kill the info
in /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules before rebooting the
virt). I have not had any problems doing this.
\_ I attended a talk where I *think* VMware mentioned a tool they
provide to do this. Check their web site.
\_ Yes. You want VMware's p2v (Physical to Virtual) tool. |
| 2008/6/6-10 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:50172 Activity:nil |
6/6 Am I in alone is really hating tabbed web browsing? I cannot stand
it! If I go to a new site I like to have a new window because I
might want to see both sites at once or I might want to kill the
window entirely if it gets hung up. From my POV tabbed browsing is
not a plus.
\_ I multitask between 2-3 different things, meaning I need to
go back and forth on documentation, manpage, various test URLs,
etc. But then again I'm a very atypical developer since I can
do many things at the same time. My take is if you're a better
single tasker, multi-tabs may be too difficult to grasp.
\_ How can you multitask when you can only see one site at a time?
Tabs are sort of the antithesis of multitasking.
\_ You are dense. I'm sure that's not the first time
you've heard this. You think everyone should think like
you and if not, they're idiots. Dumb fuck. I'm done
with you.
\_ I'm reading a piece of code, then I need to branch off
to understand a function, then I need another function,
then I need to come back, then RFTM, then email, then
calendar, then check news. I don't want to keep opening
new windows, so tab seems the best next thing.
\_ This sounds like serial tasking to me.
\_ Very true, but the cost of context-switch is
1/5-1/10 of the original cost of serially changing
URLs. Did you even take CS162?
\_ Which part of CONTEXT-SWITCH don't you
understand? Motherfucker!
\_ PP does SMP
\_ prev post is a rip-off from a movie
\_ Which is what people do. I don't think you read two
pages at the exact same time. Do you read books by
starting each page at the top all at once?
\_ And lucky for you you can turn it off.
\_ Of course. I just don't see why this is some 'feature' that
people seem to get excited about. It would be nice if it
went away.
\_ YOU don't see it, but many people do. Majority rules.
Yeah yeah, you're smarter and better than everyone else
so YOU don't see WHY people want it in the first place,
and YOU wish it would go away. What a fucking tard.
\_ Yes, the majority usually is right about deciding
what's best - from McDonald's to VHS.
\_ it's not going away. just don't use it.
\_ Well, I like it a lot, I hardly ever want to see 2 sites
at once. I do open up a lot of tabs though.
\_ Safari now makes it easy to take a tab and make it a new
window. The few times I want two windows at a time it is
a nice feature to have.
\_ Now *this* is a nice feature.
\_ And opera's had this feature for about 5 years.
\_ Great. |
| 2008/5/31 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:50105 Activity:nil |
5/31 I have a slow wireless router and slow fileserver on my network.
Is there a video or media player (windows or unix) that is smart
about caching content while playing it? I would like to be able
to hit play on a file from a file share, wait for it to catch
up for a while because my connection is so slow, walk away for
a while and come back and view my movie with no annoying skips. thanks.
\_ To answer my own question, this worked:
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=44005#p140567 |
| 2008/5/21-23 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:50023 Activity:nil |
5/21 remember the big guy who runs Comic Relief in downtown berkeley?
he died, at 50, on monday:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=%22rory%20root%22
http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/rory_root_1958_2008
\_ "Worst. News. Ever" |
| 2008/3/31-4/6 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:49622 Activity:nil |
3/31 There's this website that I'd like to perform an asshole
wget operation on it (wget -r --level=3 -k http://site.com
However, it's got rate throttling and denies me if I fetch
too quickly. Is there like a "--wait 10" command or something
I can use with wget? ok thx.
\_ man wget, look for "--random-wait".
\_ man wget, look for "--wait".
\_ Oh man, I can't believe I missed it. Thanks motd! -op
\_ Different versions have different features. Don't do this
from soda.
\_ I just did a bunch of wgets on soda. Now what? -op
\_ This could be considered a DOS attack. It's not nice to
do that from a shared machine, because you could be
prosecuted.
\_ Look up DOS attack. |
| 2008/3/17-21 [Computer/SW/Security, Industry/Jobs, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:49482 Activity:nil |
3/17 http://market-ticker.denninger.net Former sysadmin says Fed measures not addressing root of problem, IBs/banks will eventually be taken to woodshed \_ Once again, who cares if he is a sysadmin? \_ It dovetails nicely with the background of most of the pontificators on the motd. What's not to like? We really need to get this guy a soda account! \_ If sysadmins had run Bear Sterns the company would still be solvent right now. \_ He's got tech skills. I've got tech skills. Therefore I care what he says about the economy...? Huh? He may be 100% on the mark but having tech skills does not make his writing on the economy any more interesting. |
| 2008/3/13-17 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:49442 Activity:nil |
3/12 Unix sysadmin for last 6 months says: Market in for real hurting
http://ticker-classics.denninger.net
http://www.denninger.net/resume.html
\_ Uhm... so? He has some points, what does his unix background have
to do with anything either way?
\_ the non sequitur is interesting by itself
\_ maybe he's like all us losers, but in that case, it would be
interesting if he were right
\_ This guy hasn't worked since 98?
\_ i believe he sold his business for $5-15M and is doing smaller
jobs when he feels like it |
| 2008/3/6-7 [Computer/Domains, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:49354 Activity:low |
3/6 Starting a Web 2.0, scaling up slowly. Should we go the
physical-servers-in-a-colo route, or go for some sort of scalable
virtual hosting?
\_ At start? Do the cheapest thing possible. When you're ready to
get something real going hire someone who knows wth they're doing
to help you if you haven't done a colo before (sounds like not).
Otherwise you'll be sorry later when you have a pile of useless
hardware and a broken architecture that can't support your site.
\_ The person who'll be doing it is me. I've setup colos before,
but not in the last 5 years. I was just wondering if the
"best practice" for small startup had changed due to new players
like the Amazon virtual hosting thing.
\_ How big do you think you are going to be at start? If one
or two machines can handle it, throw one or two machines
somewhere cheap and don't worry about it. There's no best
practice for a site that gets in the order of 1000s of hits
a day.
\_ The only best practice you need to worry about at the
beginning like that is to ensure that your data is backed
up. If you get enough traffic to warrent it, you can do
a cost/benefits analysis of hosting vs. colo.
\_ I am aware of a wide range of startups using Amazon's EC2,
usually in conjunction with S3. The advantage is that it's
dead easy to add more resources as needed, and I get the
impression that it's not too hard to migrate away from when
and if you grow to the point where having your own hardware
becomes economical. Plus, Amazon has way more resources to
dedicate to infrastructure than you do. |
| 2008/2/28-3/4 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:49282 Activity:nil |
2/28 Is anyone's IMAP password no longer working?
\_ for the past two or three days, connecting to mead. :(
\_ It works for me. Could you please tell me when you stopped
being able to log in, and what error message you get? --mconst |
| 2008/2/6-7 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:49077 Activity:nil |
2/6 % w | sort | awk '{print $1}' | uniq | wc |
| 2008/1/31 [Finance, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:49039 Activity:nil |
1/130 Partial Filmography
* Anal Expedition 11 (Evil Angel Video) (2007)
* Big White Butt Lingerie Show (Evasive Angles) (2007)
* Black Assassins (Platinum X Pictures) (2007)
* Black Dicks In White Chicks 14 (Red Light District) (2007)
* Blow It Out Your Ass (Elegant Angel Productions) (2007)
* Cuckold (JM Productions) (2007)
* Gash Bash 3 (JM Productions) (2007)
* I'll Take It Black 3 (Red Light District) (2007)
* My First White Chick (Adam & Eve) (2007)
* Nasty Universe 3 (Mercenary Pictures) (2007)
* Nutts 4 Big Butts 2 (Exquisite Pleasures) (2007)
* Smothered N' Covered 2 (Red Light District) (2007)
* Squirts So Good 5 (DVSX) (2007)
* 1 Lucky Fuck 2 (Platinum X Pictures) (2006)
* 10 Man Cum Slam 15 (Kick Ass Pictures) (2006)
* 110% Natural 10 (Red Light District) (2006)
* 5 Guy Cream Pie 25 (Kick Ass Pictures) (2006)
* 50 To 1 3 (Platinum X Pictures) (2006)
* Ass Masterpiece 1 (Naughty America) (2006)
* Belladonna: No Warning 2 (Evil Angel Video) (2006)
* Big Booty White Girls 4 (Evil Empire) (2006)
* Big Bubble Butt Anal Sluts 1 (Evasive Angles) (2006)
* Big Bubble Butt Cheerleaders 5 (Evasive Angles) (2006)
* Big Butt Teen Flesh 1 (Evasive Angles) (2006)
* Big Tit Brotha Lovers 8 (Exquisite) (2006)
* Big Wet Asses 9 (Elegant Angel Productions) (2006) |
| 2008/1/28-2/2 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:49022 Activity:nil |
1/28 Quick regex Q: Say I have a line of data, and inside that line I
have some parts between two symbols:
This is a line ~of data~ where ~the tildes are my symbols~
How do I sed this line to get rid of the tildes and anything
between each pair of tildes? The end result should be:
This is a line where
\_ 's/~[^~]*~//g'
To handle the whitespace the way you request would be trickier
and would require more knowledge of just how you're using these
tags.
\_ Thank you. I'll work with this for now.
\_ I'm not sure I understand how your regex works. Wouldn't
's/~.*?~//g' do the job handling whitespaces as well? - ! op/pp
\_ nvm. Just understood what you meant about whitespaces. -pp |
| 2008/1/21-31 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48977 Activity:nil |
1/21 Does the "etc" in the Unix directory name "/etc" stand for "et cetera",
or is it just a coincidence? Thanks.
\_ Yes it does. |
| 2007/12/14-19 [Recreation/Dating, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48804 Activity:nil |
12/14 My wife would like a gift card for a good sausage, or possibly a day
spa sort of place. (Some place relaxing I guess.) I live in Livermore.
any ideas?
\_ Yelp. Spa. Search.
\_ I'm sorry, I don't know what this means. -op
\_ I think PP means go to http://www.yelp.com enter "spa" and
"Livermore, CA", and click search. Apparently http://www.yelp.com
is some kind of customer review site. -- !PP
\_ Nob Hill Spa is outstanding (it's in SF, however)
\_ Is there a Raley's spa?
\_ I took my wife to Kabuki Springs & Spa for a 50 minute Swedish
massage for her birthday. http://www.kabukisprings.com
Highly recommended doesn't even begin to cover it.
\_ Wow, that sounds perfect, but I'm afraid getting to and from SF
will negate the stress relief of the massage.
\_ Combine it with brunch, dinner, a show.... She'll sleep all
the way home. |
| 2007/12/13-19 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/Languages] UID:48796 Activity:nil |
12/12 Why do I get an error about /etc/tabset not existing when I type reset?
Is reset no longer the command to use to clear the screen ?
\_ Try 'clear' like normal people. Or Ctrl-L if your shell supports it. |
| 2007/12/12-19 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48790 Activity:moderate |
12/12 In an interview last week I got hit with
"What is your best quality?"
"What is your worst quality?"
I know these are standard interview questions, and I should have
expected them, but I am pretty sure I flubbed them.
What are some good responses?
\_ just do the David Lee Roth style to answering questions:
let me answer the question this way and then start
talking about whatever the hell you want
\_ Best: I never ask stupid fucking questions like this when
interviewing people.
Worst: I hate people who ask stupid shit like this and I
would never work for idiots who do.
\_ More seriously, if you can't come up with a best (or at
least damn good) quality you shouldn't be interviewing.
It is a question that gives you a chance to prove you
actually give a damn about your work and skills. The
worst quality question is still a bullshit question and
deserves all the feces you feel like flinging at it.
\_ "I respond very poorly to stupid questions."
\_ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/12
\_ http://csua.com/Computer/SW/Unix/?page=4
\_ http://csua.com/2003/09/17/#10220
(There are no good responses... but there are worse ones.
At least they only asked you for ONE bad quality.)
\_ Yeah, my last interview asked for 3.
\_ I told them the truth, I have fairly poor time management skills.
If I get wrapped up in one problem, I'll neglect the other things I
have to do. I got that job anyway.
\_ The problem with questions like these aren't that they're dumb.
They are not. The problem is that the people asking them usually
have no idea what a 'good' or 'bad' answer is. They just ask
because they were asked the same in the past. I assume at some
point in the distant past someone who knew what they were doing
came up with the best/worst question and it spread like a plague
from there. As someone above said, there is no good answer, just
don't say "my worst trait is <insert felony activity here>" and
you'll be fine.
\_ Worst trait: Sometimes I am too much of a perfectionist -or-
sometimes I work too hard or some other such bullshit. No one
expects a serious answer to such a question (or at least they
should not). It is also okay to list an actual negative trait
that you have that is not that big a deal "sometimes I get
excited about an idea in meetings and interrupt other people."
You better have some damn good answers to the "best trait"
question though.
\_ I once answered, honestly, that I don't react well to being
micromanaged, but 1) I didn't really want the job, and 2) I wasn't
offered the job. --erikred
\_ But that is the right answer is the manager was a micromanager.
\_ But that is the right answer if the manager was a micromanager.
You wouldn't have been happy anyway. Why would anyone try to
get a job they wouldn't like?
\_ In this case, because I was already in a job I didn't like.
Realization that the new gig was also what I didn't want hit
about midway through the interview.
until about midway through the interview.
\_ No matter how bad your current job is, don't flee it. Go
to a new job you want to have. Sounds like you made the
right call.
\_ Sounds like someone who never really had a job so
bad it was affecting your sleep, your health, and
other aspects of your life. Sometimes fleeing is
the best option.
\_ Oddly enough, you're both right. It was the latter
kind of job, but I needed the benefits and the
salary, and the other job would have been even
worse. Fortunately, something much, much better
came along two months later.
\_ sounds like to you, but incorrect. the guy who
replaced me didn't last 3 months. fleeing is not
a good option. you just end up at another crappy
place. and you'd miss out on the job you wanted
like the other person here posted. i see zero value
in going from one shitty life sucking job to another
shitty life sucking job.
\_ Sounds like the guy who replaced you was
smart enough to flee.
\_ He already had another job the whole time.
This job was easy for his first three months
because I unloaded all the easy but time
consuming crap on him. Once he had to do the
real work, it was easier for him to just pick
up more hours at his other job. He didn't
flee to another job. He had one all along.
\_ So he knew all along that your job
sucked, but it took you much longer to
figure it out.
\_ No he had no idea until he had to do it.
I kept it during that time because there
were no other jobs available without
taking a dramatic pay cut *and* working
for an equally shitty place. But I'm
sure you had your choice of great jobs
in the 2001-2004 years because you know
everything. |
| 2007/11/12-16 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48623 Activity:nil |
11/12 how do i make a fail safe magical backup for my debian box
that i can quickly boot from if the box explodes?
\_ keep a linux live boot cd around for just such an emergency
\_ And learn about 'dd'
\_ I was hoping there was something as slick as CCC, for unix.
\_ You can first duplicate the disk offline with dd, then just
keep it up to date with regularly scheduled rsync, which
should work fine as long as you're using a bootloader like
grub that understands the filesystem rather than lilo. A
more elaborate system would be to use a filesystem that
allows snapshotting, but probably unnecessary in most cases
if databases aren't involved. |
| 2007/11/12-16 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/OS/OsX] UID:48607 Activity:high |
11/12 Server nerds, CCC for mac is totally awesome. is there somethng
as cool and friendly for PC or unix?
\_ Hi. "CCC" is a free mac program known as "Carbon Copy Cloner".
If you use a Mac, and have some sort of external usb or firewire
drive, I recommend you spend 15 minutes downloading it and
setting it up. You can easily make a backup set up your data,
set up incremental backups, and even make a nice bootable image
of your drive onto your external usb drive, so when the disk
on your Mac finally fails (all drives fail eventually), it's
just a few minutes work getting up again (after you replace the
drive obviously). I'm not trolling, I'm just describing
my experience, my Mac is not running a terabyte SAN NAS fiber
highly available hot swapping RAID, calm the fuck down.
\_ What is CCC? -dans
\_ Wow, you are really ignorant. Stay in school!
\_ Color Climax Corp. of Denmark.
\_ Oh, so it's like rsync for people who can't be bothered to
learn rsync. -dans
\- dont be silly. i'm a "BFUN" [\infra] and probably
have looked deeper into rsync than 99% of rsync
users [i.e. how to optimize for certain large
data sets in scientific computation, see e.g.
mutli-round rsync paper], but i use these $5-$30
programs to back up my computer ... the calculus
is "are these worth $5-$30", not "can i write
something similar". ironically your comment echos
holob's "http is ftp for idiots".
\_ If I'm going to back up data it's because I value
it appreciably more than $5-$30. I've seen
elaborate backup systems fail at recovery time
because the data was corrupt. You'll forgive me
if I compare a known good one-line rsyncism to a
$5 to $30 backup program that may or may not
work. I think you and I are working with
different calculuses. -dans
\_ This is again typical: 1. you are claiming
this isnt that hard 2. You claim you wouldn't
trust a program that google will tell you has
1000s of satisified users --> 1. do you think
everyone else is a moron? or 2. do you not
feel you can tell the difference between
a review written by a moron/non moron? ...
in fact often you can even read the author's
writings and judge for yourself ... in fact
if you weren't such a pud, you might even
if you weren't pud like you, you might even
entertain the notion the author is cleverer
thn you. and it's a question of whether your
than you. and it's a question of whether your
"marginal time" to reproduce the functionlity
of the $30 software is worth $30 ... not "is
the functionality of the software worth $30".
The fundamental E_HOLARB is the "center of
universe problem": statements he makes
"about the world" often are really
"about the universe" often are really
statements about his state of knowledge.
one attendant phenomena is pronoucing things
"easy" when you really havent considered the
"easy" when you relly havent considered the
nuances. does ths sound familiar ["one line
rsync"]? you have a lot in common with
holob, except i think your head is further up
rsync"]? man you have a lot in common with
holob, except i think you head is further up
your ass ... might be interesting to see over
time whether it gets buried deeper or starts
to "slide" out.
"if the functionality of the software worth
$30". man you have a lot in common with holob,
(like assuming things where you havent
considered some nuances "simple" ... the
Fundamental Holarb Diagnosis aka the "center
of universe problem" is statements he makes
"about the universe" often are really
statements about his state of knowledge)
except i think you head is further up your
ass ... be interesting to see over time whether
it is buried deeper or starts to "slide" out.
it is gets buried deeper or starts to "slide"
out.
\_ Partha, if I didn't know how to accomplish
this with rsync already, then, yes, that
would make sense. In my case, the time
required to reproduce the functionality of
a $30 piece of software is a sunk cost. The
time to research that piece of software has
a significant marginal cost. Also, one or
even many good reviews don't offer proof
that the software doesn't have some
obscure, fatal flaw. I'm not saying that
this is the case for everyone. -dans
\_ You simply are wrong if you think
all one of these backup suites
does is rsync-type functionality.
I'm not interested in assessing
whether this error is due to
ignorance or arrogance etc.
\_ Oh, I have no doubt they do other
things; it's more a question of what
*I* need/how well it handles massive
amounts of data. -dans
\_ Do other languages have the 'your head is lodged
firmly up your ass' idiom, or is this an English
only thing?
\- only in pointer-based languages --psb
\_ So you are saying dans is difficult to
garbage collect? -- ilyas
\_ Are you saying dans is hard to garbage
collect? -- ilyas
\_ This is true. In my experience if you're not a big fucking
unix nerd and you spend all day making pretty pictures
in Adobe CS, you don't want to worry about the details
of rsync and keeping backup restoral incremental sets.
In fact even if you are a big fucking nerd you have
better things to do.
\_ I'll have to check it out. If only it was invented ten
years earlier. -dans
\_ Color Climax Corp. of Denmark. Check out its Teenage Sex series.
\_ Chaos Computer Club |
| 2007/11/5-6 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48537 Activity:kinda low |
11/5 sed/awk question. Let say i have a csv file. I need to do two things:
1. insert a comma after first character in the first column
2. merge 2nd colmun with first, separate by a comma.
so, original file may look like this
abc, def, ghi, jkl ...
it will become
a\,bc\,def, ghi, jkl
any idea?
\_ Stop rolling your own CSV parser!
http://www.secretgeek.net/csv_trouble.asp
\_ Sadly the solution he has is .NET, but yeah. Libraies exist
for this kind of stuff in every language you would ever use.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
\_ The advice is good. I used FasterCSV for Ruby and it's great.
\_ Hypothetical: the above csv libraries don't exist. Why use sed/awk
insead of perl? |
| 2007/11/1-2 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48509 Activity:nil |
11/1 What version of Linux/Unix does Samba test on before releasing
to the public? |
| 2007/10/24-26 [Politics/Domestic/California, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48436 Activity:low |
10/24 Animated gif satellite view of the fires
http://www.osei.noaa.gov/Events/Current/CaliforniaFire.gif
\_ Wow. I never heard about the one in Mexico.
\_ bah, it's only a four hour window
\_ http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery
\_ http://www.signonsandiego.com/firemap
\_ http://alg.umbc.edu/usaq |
| 2007/10/18 [Computer/Blog, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48378 Activity:nil |
10/18 To whoever seriously thought Flickr has 3 9's of uptime, I have
one thing to say to you:
http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/images/photo_unavailable.gif
-dans |
| 2007/10/9-11 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48269 Activity:nil |
10/9 It's great that soda's been more or less up for the past few months,
but I really hate Linux and all this gnu shit... ELinks, crappy vi,
etc. I miss links and a tcsh that works.
\_ What's wrong with the current tcsh on soda? Why don't you just ask
root to install links or build it yourself? Also, barring things
that actually need to talk to the kernel, e.g. threading libraries,
why would running a gnu licensed kernel stop you from installing
non-gnu software? -dans [formatd]
\_ ftp ; unzip ; untar ; make install
\_ Oops, it just went down. |
| 2007/10/4-7 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48240 Activity:high |
10/4 What's the command to create a new login on a Linux 2.6 machine?
I
already have root password. I think it's "useradd" or "adduser",
but it's not in root's path. Thanks. -- linux idiot \_useradd
-g groupname username
\_ specifically /usr/sbin/useradd. You shoudl add /sbin and
/usr/sbin to root's path, if they arent already
there. -ERic \_ It works! Thanks. -- OP
\_useradd -g groupname username
\_ specifically /usr/sbin/useradd. You shoudl add /sbin and
/usr/sbin to root's path, if they arent already there. -ERic
\_ It works! Thanks. -- OP
\_ vi, emacs, cat, echo
\_ meanie
\_ realist -dans
\_ ED IS THE STANDARD. Text editor.
\_ meanie \_ realist -dans \_ ED IS THE STANDARD. Text editor. |
| 2007/9/3 [Computer/SW/P2P, Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47877 Activity:nil |
9/3 So I was watching the Today Show this morning and in the crowd of
jackasses trying to get on TV, some dude kept emphatically showing a
home made sign that simply said, "lemonparty.org." None the wiser, I
fired up my laptop, curious as to what could possibly be at
http://lemonparty.org. I wondered why he was smiling so mischievously,
shaking his sign in the air each time the camera had him in the frame.
Could it be some family reunion site? A wedding announcement? A site
devoted to lovers of lemons? Oh no, I would not be so lucky.
No sir -- or ma'am -- it was a photograph of three geriatric men
engaged in very passionate adult loving. And by loving, I mean a good
old fashioned three-way.
Of course, I couldn't let it go at this. I had to find out more about
http://lemonparty.org, as it seemed like an inside joke to which I was not
privy. A friendly google search yielded several results, all informing
me that http://lemonparty.org is supposedly a shock site, in the ranks of
loopback.jpg, http://tubgirl.com and goatse.cx. Now, I'm not sure if the
shock value or http://lemonparty.org packs the same punch as the
aforementioned peers, but I can only imagine a suburban housewife or
lonely grandpa typing the web site in as I did, because, well, they
too had nothing better to do.
So why am I sharing this? I honestly don't know, other than I needed
to purge my conscience. I think this was either one of the most
wonderfully subversive things I've seen on TV in a long time, or one
of the more disturbing ones (although I doubt there are many young
kids watching the Today show on Labor Day). But, hey, old guys need to
get it on, too, I suppose; so lemonparty indeed!
\_ Yucks! It's amazing enough that that guy can get it up. |
| 2007/8/31-9/3 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47860 Activity:nil |
8/31 Pretend I am going to be on a boat in the arctic.
I want to upload whale song sound data while I am
on my terrible internet connection in the middle of
the arctic. What would I use? FTP seems so 80s.
\_ FTP is a tool that works and does exactly the job you want.
What's wrong with FTP?
\_ I am unwilling to open up FTP on my server back
here in the states.
\_ Why? What makes FTP more insecure than any other
way to transfer files?
\_ It's too annoying to ope nthe proper prots for
FTP . have you ever tried? if you have,
you would agree with me.
\_ All 2 ports? Tom has the right answer below but you
can safely use ftp. The real problem with what you're
looking to do is your shakey network connection. You
want to make sure your xfer mechanism has an option
to restart from where it left off if you lose your
connection. Ftp can do that.
\_ sftp/scp/rsync. -tom |
| 2007/8/26-27 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47759 Activity:nil |
8/25 I am running unix. I have root. I want to keylog myself.
How do I do that?
\_ man script
\_ no i want to recrod everything typed on my computer. any window.
any program.
\_ hack tty drivers to write to a file. |
| 2007/8/24 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47749 Activity:high |
8/24 Anybody experiencing login authentication problems? I cannot login
using my login and passwd thru ssh on the SECOND attempt and on:
ie, when I do ssh csua, it works once, but not afterwards.
Then when I do ssh http://csua.berkeley.edu, it works once, but not afterwards.
I can STILL login when I use a machine that use ssh authorized public
keys (with the ssh passwd), but not the unix login/passwd.
After I login, when I do a passwd, I get the *new* LDAP passwd prompt
that allows me to change the passwd, but only once. After that,
I can no longer access that LDAP prompt (seems like the LDAP server
is rejecting any requests from a particular host after first attempt),
but instead I get the *old* unix passwd change prompt that won't take
*any* of my passwds:
(current) UNIX password:
passwd: Authentication failure
passwd: password unchanged
After about an hour, if I do passwd, I get the new LDAP prompt again--
but only once again. Basically the LDAP prompt comes back in about
once every hour.
If an admin is reading this please help. Seems like the LDAP server
is down and/or unix passwd is out of sync. Thanks. --pchen |
| 2007/8/24 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47748 Activity:nil |
8/24 Anybody experiencing login authentication problems? I cannot login
with unix passwd thru ssh, although I was able to login using my ssh
auth keys/cert. Then when I type passwd to change the passwd,
I'm getting an LDAP passwd change prompt--but only once: if I type
passwd again, I get the Unix passwd change prompt. In any case,
it won't accept my old passwd nor allow me to change the passwd.
What's going on? Also mail is not working (nothing sent nor received).
I emailed root and get no response yet. If an admin is reading
this please help. Thanks. -pchen |
| 2007/8/18-20 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/Security] UID:47652 Activity:kinda low 80%like:47603 |
8/17 hey root you wanna restore /csua/bin/mtd one day?
\_ did you mail root about it?
\_ do you really have to mail root when all of
/csua/bin/ disappears?
\_ empirical evidence would say, "yes, you do". -!root
\_ yeah. |
| 2007/8/18 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47649 Activity:nil |
8/17 How to I grep to exclude all lines with more than 1 / ?
\_ After reading the grep man page:
grep -v -E '/[^/]*/' myFile |
| 2007/8/13 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/Security] UID:47605 Activity:nil |
8/13 hey root would you engage in scrotal inflation? thanks
\_ Have you emailed root? Because the motd.public isn't the preferred
contact method.
\_ I did.
\_ Hey root, i think Spamassassin is dead too.
\_ I think root is too busy leveling in WoW. |
| 2007/8/13 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/Security] UID:47603 Activity:kinda low 66%like:47566 80%like:47652 |
8/13 hey root would you restore /csua/bin/mtd ? thanks.
\_ Have you emailed root? Because the motd.public isn't the preferred
contact method.
\_ I did.
\_ Hey root, i think Spamassassin is dead too.
\_ I think root is too busy leveling in WoW. |
| 2007/8/8-10 [Academia/Berkeley/CSUA, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47566 Activity:nil 66%like:47603 |
8/7 not that you're gonna read this ROOT but you could you restore
/csua/bin/mtd ? thanks
\_ ObDansFlamewar
\_ Huh? -dans
\_ I guess he means that you're famous for flaming
anyone who ever complains about ROOT not doing
anything or not fixing things that meet the wants
of the alums.
\_ Kind of an oversimplification, but whatever. -dans
\_ There was a setuid script /csua/bin/mtd what I assumed cron
periodically uses to merge /etc/motd.official and /etc/motd.public .
I just want root to put it back, and while they're at it,
make /csua/bin/ sticky. I mailed root@csua too. |
| 2007/8/7-13 [Computer/SW/Languages/Perl, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47555 Activity:nil |
8/7 I'm trying to figure out whether it's possible for get wget to
authenticate to a web page protected by a login form ('post'
method to send username/pass, and cookies.) Cookies don't seem
to be the problem, with --save-cookies and --keep-session-cookies
but getting the username/password submitted isn't doing it. On
this particular page, getting to a link, let's say 'example.aspx',
redirects to 'login.aspx?href=/example.aspx'; login.aspx is a
standard http form. Anyone ever get this working? -John
\_ You want a single wget command or are you scripting this?
If scripting just hit the logon page first to get your cookie.
Otherwise you have to recognize you've been redirected.
\_ Why wget? Have you tried curl?
\_ I've been able to get this working using wget's CLI options
--user=[user] and --password=[passwd] or by posting the
right form elements for authentication.
\_ Yeah tried both, no good. Curl sounds like it might
work, though. Thanks. -John
\_ If curl doesn't work for you, I've done this in perl before. It
isn't that hard with cpan's lwp, cookie libraries, etc.
\_ Or if you hate Perl, Ruby does a good job too.
\_ Curl works for submitting the credentials, but I'm having
trouble with cookies; the site issues 4 for a normal
browser login, but with curl I only get one. I'll keep
plugging. -John
\_ How can you hate perl for a hack script like this? |
| 2007/8/6-22 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47542 Activity:nil |
8/6 http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wilburjr&search=Search Lies lies lies. \_ I can't view youtube from work. What is this? \_ boring. |
| 2007/8/1 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/Languages/Perl] UID:47500 Activity:high |
8/1 perl/sed/awk/etc question:
Is there a good way to change every other delimiter or string
match? For example change a colon delimited list to a :+, one...
Apple:12:Pear:2:Orange:9:Plum:7:Banana:22:Mango:2 to
Apple:12,Pear:2,Orange:9,Plum:7,Banana:22,Mango:2
(And I dont mean a trick that relies on some fields being
alpha and some numeric or only a known number of fields).
\_ How 'bout the straightforward approach
s/([^:]+:[^:]+):/$1,/g
\_ That didn't work?! Am I doing something wrong?
echo Apple:12:Pear:2:Orange:9 |sed -e 's/([^:]+:[^:]+):/$1,/g'
Apple:12:Pear:2:Orange:9
\_ use perl, sed will kill you with quoting.
\_ Thanks! perl -pe ... does it!
\_ One more question, why is there a differene between : and |?
I now need to use |.
echo "Prog 1:61.3:Ch 2:91.0:Num3:83.4" |perl -pe 's/([^:]+:[^:]+):/$1,/g'
Prog 1:61.3,Ch 2:91.0,Num3:83.4
echo "Prog 1|61.3|Ch 2|91.0|Num3|83.4" |perl -pe 's/([^|]+|[^|]+)|/$1,/g'
Prog 1,,|61.3,,|Ch 2,,|91.0,,|Num3,,|83.4
First one works. Second does not.
\_ man perlre, search for | |
| 2007/7/23-26 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/Unix/WindowManager] UID:47383 Activity:nil |
7/23 shac don't you work at http://foxnews.com? what the hell are you doing? http://reddit.com/info/28nfk/comments |
| 2007/7/23-26 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:47378 Activity:nil |
7/23 Can anyone recommend a lightweight caching web proxy for unix
that is not squid? thanks.
\_ Apache used to have a caching module. The only other non-
commerical caching proxy I know of is polipo:
http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo
I don't know anyone who is using it though.
\_ What is wrong with squid? -ausman |
| 2007/7/6 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/SW/Languages/Perl] UID:47196 Activity:high |
7/6 my google fu is weak. How do I match EOF ( tr or perl or sed or any
linux tool that will do substitutions in a file)? thanks.
\_ What are you trying to do? |
| 2007/6/12-14 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:46925 Activity:high |
6/12 Inside of a C++ program, I do a "ps | grep usename" for logging
purposes. where username = getenv("USER"); Doing this directly is a
gigantic security hole because someone could set $USER to some command
line and execute arbitrary code. What's the best way to make this
safe? Is there some standard way to check the input in a case like
this?
\_ How about "ps | grep \"username\""?
\_ man getuid, man getpwuid
\_ How's your motd logger going?
\_ I hope OP isn't doing this for a motd logger. There are much
easier ways than writing C++.
\_ Some versions of ps support a -U flag (or similar) that lets you
pass in the username OR userid. Safest way would be to (1) take the
username and translate it to the uid via getpwuid, getpwnam,
&c.; (2) exec ps (w/ the full path) and that uid; and (3) read the
output in C++. Any otherway is not 100% safe.
output in C++. Any other way is not 100% safe.
If your version of ps does not support user filtering, you should
exec ps (w/ the full path) and read/filter the output yourself.
Whatever you do, don't use system() and if you are running as root,
please drop privileges before calling exec().
\_ Not running as root. system() is bad, huh?
\_ Yes. system invokes a shell for you (in some cases csh). And
please use a full path, last thing you want is to be running
a PFY's hax0r'ed version of ps.
\_ system() is basically a wrapper around '/bin/sh -c $command'
with all the vulnerabilities and performance hit you get from
spawning the /bin/sh -c and what the shell might do with
$command. You're generally safer with fork && exec(command)
though then you have to deal with $PATH and massaging the
arguments.
\_ you should also read up on IFS.
\_ you should also read up on IFS. --psb
\_ What is IFS?
\_ IFS stands for Internal Field Separator, it is
what the shell uses to separate elements of the
various *PATH variables, among other things.
\_ and at the heart of many old skool attacks
such as /usr/lib/ex3.7preserve and other
insecure popen() problems.
insecure popen() problems. --psb
\_ Ok, but the command line I'm passing to system is pretty
complex. I don't care much about the performance, since
the logging is pretty rare. But I used "ps | grep $USER |
| sort | head" to get only the results I wanted. Seems
like fork exec would in this case would be hard. -op
\_ yes it would be. secure code is hard. insecure
code is easy.
\_ One possible sol'n would be to implement your filter
as a one line perl command and then send the output of
ps to that perl command. You would reduce the problems
to two fork/execs and would increase your security.
But the safest way is still to do as much as you can
in C and not in the shell via system().
BTW, why do use use $USER from the environment? Can't
you read it in using a CLI option or use the current
user id via getuid() or geteuid()?
\_ Actually, because I didn't know about getuid().
\_ I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to do,
but I think you can do all of it w/o system()
and not too much work in c++. Based on the above,
it seems like you could read the output of ps -U
[uid] (or equivalent) into a STL string vector,
sort the results and take the top 10. |
| 2007/6/8-11 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:46892 Activity:low |
6/8 I was talking to an acquaintance who said that his workplace was
slowly evolving to a stated goal of taking superuser privileges
away from the sysadmins in an effort to maintain a strict CM
and, I assume in some way, lower costs - possibly by hiring
trained monkeys to deploy pre-built images. I am curious what the
IT theories are behind this. Is this a crackpot method of system
management or is there some established theory behind this? Has
anyone else seen this happen at their work? What were the results?
My kneejerk reaction is that this is a Very Bad Thing, but maybe
there's something to it.
\_ Depends. Are they mostly Windows? Mostly UNIX? Who still has
superuser access? Are they highly responsive? It can be made to
work. But unless it's driven by competent IT management, it could
be LOTS o' PAIN
\_ All UNIX. I assume the idea is that if a change needs to be
made then it is rolled out from some central server
somewhere and no admins ever touch the individual workstations
for any reason except perhaps hardware failure.
\_ CM?
\_ configuration management
\_ No, this is in keeping with Best Practices surrounding security,
especially the notion of "least privelege" which is to say that
especially the notion of "least privilege" which is to say that
people should have the permissions they need to do their job
and no more. I personally think this is fine, but only works
after an organization reaches a certain maturity and size.
You need at least enough people so that you can have an on-call
page rotation for the "root" team and another one for the
"admin" team. Email if you want to talk about this some more
this is something I have thought about quite a bit. -ausman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege
http://www.csua.org/u/ivq (Forrester Research) |
| 2007/5/21-24 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:46717 Activity:nil |
5/21 Yo root - any chance of reenabling finger (for finger motd@csua)? |
| 5/16 |