PC Tips & Tricks


mkisofs -J -allow-leading-dots -allow-multidot -R -V "Label" -iso-level 4 -o image.iso Folder


where:

• -J:  Generate Joliet directory informatio
• -allow-leading-dots:  Allow ISO9660 filenames to start with ‘.’
• -allow-multidot: Allow more than one dot in filenames (e.g. .tar.gz)
• -R:  Generate Rock Ridge directory information
• -V: Set Volume ID
• -o:  Set output file name
• -iso-level:  Set ISO9660 conformance level (1..3) or 4 for ISO9660 version 2

If your server setup does not support creating file systems snapshots rsync-ing the message store is not the best solution because you may have to keep Scalix off for a long time. So you will need another way for saving data.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is a small shell script I use to organize my pictures.
I usually download pictures from my digital camera to a folder and from time to time I want to put them in the folder corresponding to the date I took them. This script reads the EXIF data from the pictures and copies them to where they belong. The directory structure looks like this:
Read the rest of this entry »

Here are 5 shell scripts you might find useful:

1. Dump a MySQL database and gzip the result =>Dump database (164)
2. Find duplicate files in a folder (it works even if the duplicate files have different names, which can be be helpful for mp3 files) =>Find duplicates (207)

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Thou shalt not log in as root.
2. Thou shalt use the package manager when possible.
3. Thou shalt be a part of the community.
Read the rest of this entry »

“Nagios® is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program.” (from nagios.org)

Nagios has a lot of features, making it a very powerful monitoring tool. Some of the major features are listed below:

• Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
• Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.)
• Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own host and service checks
• Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
• External command interface that allows on-the-fly modifications to be made to the monitoring and notification behavior through the use of event handlers, the web interface, and third-party applications
• Web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.

Installing Nagios

In FreeBSD you can install from ports. (/usr/ports/net-mgmt/nagios*). Some Linux distributions also include Nagios.

Read the rest of this entry »

What you need:

1. Connection to Internet
2. The Linux distro you prefer
3. Streamripper
4. Streamtuner
5. XMMS (optional)

Depending the Linux distribution you use, you can install streamtuner and streamripper from repositories or you can get the sources and compile yourself.
You can find the sources here:

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I finally quit using Windows on my home PC. I was a Vista user since the Beta 2 release, but I had enough. Yesterday Firefox (2.x) started to crash. I tried Firefox 3, but the same result. It seemed to work OK, but after a while it just started to die (StackHash module error). So I decided it is time to move to Linux.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always wanted to have my work files synced between my laptop, my home server and the server at work, so I can use them whenever I need. Doing a manual copy after using them is an option, but it’s the worst one. A better alternative is to copy the folder I use every day, but this is time consuming and I usually don’t have the time to wait for the copy to be done. So I decided to use rsync which has many advantages. First of all I can use it in a script, so I don’t have to remember what files I modified. Also, rsync keeps my folder(s) synced by copying only the modified files. Read the rest of this entry »