One of the most cumbersome parts of *nix is typing out god damn directory paths. Worse is when you need to switch back and forth between them. If you’re like me, you never typo directory names when shuffling back and forth (sure… )
pushd & popd allow you to memorize a directory, and then quickly switch back to it. Try this on for size:
$ pwd
/home/some/long/directory/name/goes/here/
$ pwd | pushd
$ cd /home/ian/
$ popd
$ pwd
/home/some/long/directory/name/goes/here/
Handy!
I like most standards, I can’t deny it. One thing that I find too humorous is the amount of sites that are not valid, even sites that claim they are. One tool in my box is HTML Validator, an extensioni for Firefox. A nice little icon appears in the lower right, indicating whether a page is valid, not-so-valid, or really-not-so-valid. Makes it easy to check your own sites, and others.
Situation: You need to do some mass desktop deployment, but the scrap heap NICs that come with those budget boxen don’t support PXE booting. Plunk, goes the life preserver as it hits you in the head.
ROM-o-Matic is a webpage that will generate image files which you can then burn and boot off. Pick your NIC and image type, hit Get ROM and you’re done. No software to download, how sweet is that?
This is a go live? I’ve just ripped Thought Deposit from the IT department nursery and flung her into the chaotic swirling internets. I wanted the freedom of a VPS, by far the most common VPS system for webhosting is Virtuozzo. Unfortunately Virtuozzo hosts have a rep for overselling processor time.
Our new VPS on Slicehost uses Xen virtualization. Overselling is not much of a problem with Xen based VPSes, largely thanks to Xen’s design. Slicehost also has a very cool AJAX console, for those times when you get firewall rule happy and lock yourself out — I’m told.
Default “slice” OSs are Ubuntu, CentOS, and Gentoo. But by following Marko’s Howto you can hijack your Ubuntu setup and install Debian over it, my preferred distro.
So, you’ve logged into a box via Remote Desktop, but for whatever reason the Shutdown/Reboot buttons are not enabled.
Fear not! Simply enter:
shutdown -r
At a command prompt, and you should reboot in 30 seconds.
I don’t know quite how this could fit into our organization (yet?) except VirtualMin is a webmin addition that allows simple virtual hosting. It allows interfaces at the admin, reseller and customer level.
http://www.webmin.com/index8.html
Dreams do come true! FFDeploy is a deployment tool for Firefox, allowing you to automatically install Firefox along with any extensions, themes, and pre-config options you like.
So, we all know I have punched a few wrong keys into the Cisco at times. Who hasn’t?! Well now I’m too afraid to do ANYTHING with the Ciscos, but no more!
1) Emulation.
There are certain packages that let you pretend a cisco exists. I’m looking forward to testing the Cisco 7200 Simulator more, but from the limited testing it looks pretty complete. That is, it can actually ping/talk to other Cisco routers! I’ll make sure to setup a “fake” router somebody can access over the VPN (inside a vserver) to do testing.
a) Linux: http://sourceforge.net/projects/oece
b) Linux: http://www.ipflow.utc.fr/index.php/Cisco_7200_Simulator
c) Windows: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/nemnsw/cm/index.shtml
2) A simple command.
This is the big one, I though, “is it possible to reboot a cisco after X minutes in case you mess up?” The answer is: yup. Let’s say you were going to modify an access list, something that might break connectivity. Type in:
pdxrouter# reload in X
Say Y to save file, then if you mess up, the router will just reload to a state before the changes you made.
Nifty, wish I knew this before.