There are many tools to check the hard drive performance on Linux system. Here we are are concentrating on hdparm. A CentOS 6.7 Linux distribution is what is being used for this article. To install it, yum install -y hdparm. A sample run, hdparm -Tt /dev/sda The man pages (man hdparm) will offer many different configuration options, the two switches…
Read More »A typical situation is one where there is a directory that contains many files. Maybe 100s of files or more. Searching through however many files for a specific string can get annoying, however, here are a couple of ways to do just that. Note that there are many more, but this really isn’t the point of this article. A use…
Read More »If you are using something like imap.mail.yahoo.com or outlook.office365.com and would like to add a firewall rule to open the appropriate IPs to access could be quite a challenge. These IPs seem to change often. Here are a couple of command lines that may help sort through this mess. Typically, a simple command would be executed with results. nslookup outlook.office365.com…
Read More »The Microsoft WSUS server can and has run out of disk space. The appropriate items for updates are selected, the appropriate languages are selected, but in the end the server runs out of space. The native WSUS cleanup wizard doesn’t seem to be of much use when trying to correct this. Here is a process that I have found and…
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One of the MySQL servers was running out of space, it turned out to be over 7GB of bin logs filling up the hard drive rather quickly. Since this server is not replicating, then a few modifications to the my.ini or my.cnf file will disable this “feature”. Edit the my.cnf file. Yours may be somewhere so search for it with…
Read More » Every now and again a MySQL root password may have been forgotten or undocumented along the way, but that does not negate the need to access the MySQL server. There is a way to gain access to the MySQL server to change the password for root and eventually log in as root. Applies to: CentOS / RHEL / Scientific Linux…
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Every now and again I perform a Microsoft Windows Search of a folder. The results are incomplete as the folder may contain PDF files. The PDF files are not being searched for content. There are a few simple steps to determine if PDFs are being indexed. Go to your Start Menu > Control Panel > View by: Small icons > Indexing Options >…
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Mozilla Thunderbird is a free email application. MozBackup is a utility for creating backups of Thunderbird and other Mozilla applications. It can backup and restore everything from your bookmarks, history, plugins, mail, to contacts. MozBackup offers command line functionality which supposedly allows for command line backups, however, I have encountered it to loop repeatedly, and endlessly. Backing up a profile,…
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Have you ever wondered at what speed your network is really operating? There are several programs and utilities that are readily available. I have tested a couple, however, this one seems to be the easiest and very efficient. This was tested on a CentOS 7 server. From the server, which in this case is 10.10.10.10. From the client. A result…
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One approach to adding space to an existing Linux hard drive that is using Linux LVM is to add space to the drive. This can easily be accomplished in VMware. This has been tested using VMware Workstation 9.0 for Windows with CentOS 6.5 (minimal install). To demonstrate a before and after, here are a few commands that can be used…
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A bug which could allow for arbitrary code execution has been discovered, Red Hat alerted, and patches exist. So, I simple yum update should take care of things. However, Red Hat offers command line arguments which may be used to test for the vulnerability. Using the command issued below, different warnings may appear, however, the following result is one of…
Read More » An anoyance with cloning a Linux virtual machine is that the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file may contain a UUID and HWADDR which can be removed and the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules can be deleted or zero’ed out. So, here are the steps I use to create a “template”. After cloning the system, the first screen should be the option to set a root password. Since,…
Read More »Having to make modifications to a Microsoft Word document, it became painfully clear that there were modifications that could not be made as there were restrictions imposed on to the document and password protected. Not having access to the password, a solution to remove the password became known to me and after having applied it, it worked successfully and painlessly….
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Event ID 2017 is “The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.” This identified on a Windows 7 workstation. The resolution is a couple of registry changes. Here is a screenshot of the System log file filtered for Event ID 2017. Here is the fix. Source(s)…
Read More » A CentOS7 Linux server was used to create Samba shares so that Windows clients of a home network may back up their stuff, resulting in one share with read write access. The ultimate goal was to create a Samba share that would act as if it were one of those off-the-shelf “solutions” like a Buffalo Linkstation, where no user password…
Read More »Microsoft has a little gem some have called “GodMode“, but there are actually 16 of them. These modes are easy to add to your computer. Simply create a folder and name them with a specific name. Setup GodMode From the desktop: Here is a list of the modes that you would use to replace the {xxxx-xxx-xxx-xxx} above: {ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} {00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33} {0142e4d0-fb7a-11dc-ba4a-000ffe7ab428}…
Read More » A configuration file, specifically, the /etc/samba/smb.conf file contains many lines of comments using both the simi-colon (“;“) and the hash (“#“) as well as many empty lines that are either blank or contain whitespace. Using grep to view the file without these lines is one way to do so. To write the correct command can be a bit more challenging….
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