Getting root access in OSX is a task that stumps a lot of new users. Ideally you shouldn’t need root at all, sudo should be enough. But sometimes you just need root. Here’s how to enable the root user in OSX Tiger.
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| First, open up NetInfo Manager in the Utilities folder. |
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| Next click the lock to authenticate yourself, you will need to have administrative rights. |
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| Select Enable Root User from the Security drop-down menu. You may be asked to authenticate yourself once more. |
Now that you have enabled the root user, you will probably want to change it’s default password. In most cases the root user’s password is either blank, or the first administrative user for this computer’s password. |
| Back in the Security drop-down menu, select Change Root Password |
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| Enter the previous root password once, the new one twice. |
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You can now become the root user from the command line by typing su and your new root password. |
I’m talking in terms of keystrokes, and you don’t know the PID.
pgrep fooapp | xargs kill – 9
That’s twenty-three characters, including whitespace, excluding the process name. What’s quicker?
This tutorial covers the exact same ground as my previous one, creating a RAID1 Array. But this time it’s command line baby. Aside from impressing your friends and family, knowing how to create a RAID array using the DiskPart command line tool is useful because it allows you to script drive and volume manipulation. This can be a lifesaver for sysadmins.
We all like Google, and Google Analytics is a cool tool. But, what happens when you want to run the tool yourself? You could take a look at phpMyVisites. The screenshots look impressive, and the demo illustrates impressive features. One thing I have never fully appreciated about Google Analytics is the fact that it uses Flash, which is still a bit of an annoyance for us Linux users.
phpMyVisites could be a viable supplement.
Here’s my first shot at a howto by way of screencast. This tutorial shows you how to add a mirrored drive array in Windows Server 2003 (and XP).
Again, this is my first stab at this, so have some patience on the technology side. What the heck is the best way to thumbnail a 800×600 movie in a blog post column anyway?
Yea, you read that right. Three commands and you can run a pen-test on your website/webserver. So, how?
kelvin@home:~$ sudo apt-get install nikto
kelvin@home:~$ sudo nikto -update
kelvin@home:~$ nikto -h www.thoughtdeposit.net
As you can see, Nikto is a web server scanner, apparently for over 3200 dangerous files/vulnerabilities. Additional features can be seen at the Nikto website, yet you will certainly want to add this old gem to your webserver toolbelt as soon as possible.
In the next year I plan to make a little video, nothing fancy likely, but something that will require an editor. However, I don’t own a mac (which rules our Final Cut Pro + After Effect and iMovie, which Ian and I both have had too much fun with. Inside joke.) I’m also a die-hard Linux fan, trying to hold out buying a mac for as long as possible.
SF to the rescure. There are four editors listed, and in the next year I’ll try them all. Overalll, they look quite promising.
Jahshaka — Beta. Good reviews from what I’ve seen.
Kdenlive — Alpha/Beta. Looks a lot less mature than Jahshaka, especially since I’m going to have to check it out via svn. But, the screenshots look quite impressive.
LiVES — Beta.
The dread of every webmaster. Of every e-commerce site. Of every blogger.
For those whom have advertising or offer services on their pages, a site that is down = a site not making money. The first step to solving a down site is knowing that it is down. But nobody wants to visit their site every few minutes, so, uptime checkers here we come!
Some sites are setup to monitor ports on your sever (e.g. port 80 for web service), and if the port is closed, they can perform an action. For instance, in geek code, if(sitedown) { sms(kelvin) }. Or, you can use the free services that have less features (for instance, less frequent checks or fewer ports.
All of this would be quite trivial to implement, but it already exists, so why not take advantage of it?
I use, and recommend, Hyperspin. But have heard nice things about Siteuptime.
Windows groups can be squirrely. The key to grocking them is knowing the order windows processes, or “expands”, them in.
The rule of thumb is that a group can have as a member any other type of group that has already been expanded. For example, the local group is the most flexible because it’s expanded last. Pretty much anything can be a member of a local group because by the time the server’s authority expands it, all the other group memberships are known. Global groups, on the other hand, because they’re expanded first, are heavily restricted. At the time they’re expanded, we know very little: The client’s domain starts with the user’s SID and begins expansion from there.
“What is a Group?” has a set of nice hand-scrawled diagrams to walk you through it all.
I’ve always wondered, how would my site deal if a lot of traffic got sent to it? Could I tune it to maximize the return based on the hardware it is running on? Sure, and Siege appears to be the answer.
This little tool is a great way to slap tons of load on your sever. You’ll need a testing computer (say, a personal computer with quite a bit of power), a decent connection, and your website. This is how you run it:
kelvin@home: siege -c350 -t30s http://www.thoughtdeposit.net/tipstricksandhacks/gtd-in-dashboard
And this will yield:
Transactions: 474 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 29.71 secs
Data transferred: 4.98 MB
\Response time: 11.09 secs
Transaction rate: 15.95 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.17 MB/sec
Concurrency: 176.86
Successful transactions: 474
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 29.18
Shortest transaction: 1.20
See, pretty nifty, eh? Do a man on Siege to find what each switch stands for. Also of interest is ApacheBench and jMeter. I have tested out jMeter, and it appears to be a very full testing tool. A good list can be found here
I have tested out lighttpd using this tool, and decided to switch back to Apache (for now!) I look forward to testing out Apache’s worker MPM with PHP, and see if that gives a performance boost. Will report on that later.