Author Archives: Mark
Viewing A File With All The Special & Control Characters
Sometimes I want view a file and see all the tabs replaced with a tab character and see line endings clearly marked. This might be because I’m trying to parse the file somehow, writing a regex to match something, or … Continue reading
Running a Public Mirror
We run the Nexcess public mirror for distros and software our servers and employees use. Running our own mirror reduces our bandwidth usage since the traffic for updates and installations of our CentOS servers never leaves our network. It also … Continue reading
64 Bit CentOS Installing 32 Bit Packages
When you do a fresh install of x86_64 CentOS 5, you might be surprised and annoyed to find yum trying to install 32 bit packages on your 64 bit server. You’ve got a 64 bit processor and operating system so … Continue reading
Puppet – Use It For More Than Just Servers
I use virtual machines at work and home to test and experiment with various things. After setting up a new virtual machine, I install some of the programs I use on a daily basis like emacs, gawk, ack, etc. But … Continue reading
Configuring djb’s dnscache on Interworx Servers for Speed
The control panel we use, Interworx, comes with djbdns as its DNS server. djbdns is actually a suite made up of several separate servers, the two main ones being tinydns for iterative (non-recursive) lookups and dnscache for recursive lookups. Other … Continue reading
Ack is Better Than Grep
In my last blog posting I wrote about some basic features of grep. If you already use grep a lot, it was probably a pretty boring post. One problem I used to have is when running grep, I’d get a … Continue reading
Features of Grep
In my last blog posting I wrote about features of the less pager. Its one of those very common Linux utilities that everyone uses but no one reads the man page to learn about features. Just like less, everyone uses … Continue reading
Features of the Less Pager
less is what is known as a pager in the world of Linux. Pagers are used to view files or output piped in. As their name implies, they’re used when there are multiple pages of text that can’t fit on … Continue reading
Swaks Makes Testing SMTP Servers Easier
I have the pleasure of dealing with mail problems frequently, specifically problems getting messages delivered from our servers to other servers. When diagnosing a problem, I usually ended up telnetting directly to the server to send it some commands to … Continue reading
Making the CentOS 6 Boot Splash Screen More Verbose
CentOS 6 comes with a splash screen that displays a progress bar as it boots. This looks nice and might be cool on a desktop for some eye candy but I’d rather watch what is happening. You can hit any … Continue reading
