My PC ← Ryan's Random Ramblings

Managing VPNs from the CLI in Linux

Mar

14

2013

Since I have finally made the switch on my work laptop to use Linux (Ubuntu 12.10) as my primary OS, I have found a few bugs that slow me down on a regular basis. One of the bugs is that the nm-applet will stop working correctly and won’t let me make any changes to the ...

How to use sed to replace a string in multiple files

Apr

18

2011

Using sed, it is possible to do a search and replace across one or many files. The syntax is as follows: sed -i 's/search/replace/g' [filename] The -i option does inline editing so that the file is actually edited. Without the -i, the file is not edited, but the replacement is printed to the screen. The ...

Chrome OS laptop – Cr-48

Dec

19

2010

I had an excellent surprise today when my neighbor rang my bell to let me know a couple packages had been mistakenly delivered to his house last week. If that wasn’t enough of a surprise, when I opened the boxes, my jaw hit the floor upon realizing that one of them was a brand new ...

Find drive space hogs in Linux

Jul

1

2010

Here is a command that I’ve worked out to help find the source of drive space issues in Linux. This format will only look at directories (ie, it will not report file sizes, just size of directories) and it will recurse into subdirectories. du | sort -n -r | head | awk ‘{print $2}’ | ...

Outbound mail

Dec

19

2009

I recently set up a security camera and wanted to be able to mail myself security events. The first thing I had to do was get AT&T to open port 25 from my house. This was painlessly done by asking an agent in the online support chat. Within a minute of asking if it can ...

Edit photo timestamps

Oct

18

2009

After moving photos around my network, the file timestamps no longer match when the photo was actually taken. Using digiKam, I confirm that the exif data is correct and then use jhead to synchronize the exif data with the file timestamps. The syntax that works best for me is this: jhead -ft *.jpg I actually ...

Remove Pulseaudio from Ubuntu 8.10

Apr

5

2009

I have had a lot of problems with pulseaudio in Ubuntu and today found simple instructions to remove it so I can use ALSA//OSS. The 2 most common problems that I have seen is that it periodically causes problems with flash videos on the web (ie YouTube) and then most recently, I couldn’t get audio ...

Changing UID/GID in CentOS

Jan

20

2009

CentOS/Red Hat/Fedora create users/groups beginning with 500 where all other distros (that I’m aware of) begin with 1000. Since I use the same account throughout all my servers and have shares mounted between them, it is much easier if my UID/GID matches between systems. I have found it rather easy to change on CentOS as ...

rdesktop info

Jan

20

2009

Found a few useful options for rdesktop to be able to share a clipboard as well as a local disk. This will share the clipboard and a local path with the remote server. rdesktop -u -r clipboard:PRIMARYCLIPBOARD -r disk:=/share/path 1.2.3.4 </blockquote Found this useful information here: pandaeatsbamboo.blogspot.com

VirtualBox VRDP

Jan

5

2009

Finally got my VM’s running headless and have been able to connect from my laptop. To start the VM, issue this command: VBoxHeadless -startvm “CentOS01” Then from another PC, start rdesktop (RDP client) and connect to the host ip address. This will open the console session to the VM. The port can be changed by ...