mikas blog

Configuration management tools provide the ability to abstract your requirements. For example you might be running your own (procedural) scripts – which could be even platform specific (igitt) – to add new users. Instead when using a configuration management tool you instruct the system in a (declarative) specification language to do so. This provides much […]

Frank Terbeck, a grml developer, implemented vcs_info for the Zsh. vcs_info is a nice and flexible system for providing version control information information within the Zsh prompt. It provides support for bzr, cdv, cvs, darcs, git, hg, mtn, p4, svk, svn and tla. vcs_info is available since zsh-beta, version 4.3.6-dev-0+20080929-1 or later and using the […]

Seriously, if you don’t know GNU screen yet: where are you living? 8-) Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. If you want to leave (not exit) your current shell session(s) and re-attach them later again: GNU screen is the answer. If you don’t use […]

Displaying more with less: lesspipe.sh is an input filter for the pager less as described in its man page. The script runs under a ksh compliant shell (ksh, bash, zsh) and allows to view files with binary content, compressed files, archives and files contained in archives. A large and growing number of formats are supported […]

Clifford Wolf war ja im September mit 2 Vorträgen zu Besuch in Graz. Jetzt gibt es die Videos dazu online: Vom (MOSFET) Transistor zum (CMOS) Gatter Sourcecode Management mit GIT Die Credits gehen an Wolfgang Dautermann.

IPython is an enhanced interactive Python shell. It provides some nifty features the usual python console doesn’t provide. Check out the Quick IPython tutorial, the IPython cookbook, IPython as a system shell and the IPython reference for more information.

The “Bluetooth Applet 1.8” preferences dialog of the Gnome desktop on Ubuntu is broken: The plus and the trash symbol seem reasonable. But the “connector” and the info button just don’t provide any deterministic behaviour. Thanks for not providing any tooltips so the user might get an idea what the buttons could do for him. […]

The current release of grml does NOT ship Truecrypt. But why? Truecrypt claims to be a “Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux”. The reason is simple: because the TrueCrypt License Version 2.6 is not a real open source license and does not permit distribution. Quoting section VI./4: 4. […]

Wie schon einmal gebloggt habe ich mir ja vor Kurzem das LG X110 Netbook gekauft. Was ich bisher feststellen kann: die FUTJISTU-Festplatte ist mir bei intensiver Beanspruchung eine Spur zu laut (es wird Zeit für interessantere Preise bei den SSDs :)) die Lüfterlautstärke ist OK (ich bin da ziemlich sensibel) die Akkulaufzeit ist mit ~2:00-2:30h […]

FAI is an automated installation tool to install or deploy Debian GNU/Linux and other distributions on a bunch of different hosts or a Cluster. It’s more flexible than other tools like kickstart for Red Hat, autoyast and alice for SuSE or Jumpstart for SUN Solaris. FAI can also be used for configuration management of a […]

Wenn Anwender neue Möglichkeiten von sich aus entdecken: Kurztipp: grml-small 2008.11 via PXE booten ohne NFS, von Markus Wigge auf pro-linux.de Danke Markus, YMMD.

I assume you already know grml, the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool users. Besides booting via CD and USB there’s one further method worth knowing: booting via network. That’s where grml-terminalserver is showing up. Using grml-terminalserver you can boot grml via network. If your computer(s) is/are able to boot via PXE all […]

One of the tools you probably already have on your system but might not be aware of: at. at(1) reads commands from standard input or a specified file which are to be executed at a later time. Some usage examples (notice: you’ll get the <EOT> by pressing ctrl-d, you know): Download something at a given […]

Not a software tool but something for sysadmins to think about: The Admin Zen. The goal of this cheat sheet is to provide ~100 concise ideas, concepts and rules for sysadmins. Reading them takes a few minutes. Practicing them takes forever. Grab the PDF printout from adminzen.org, send it to the printer and think about […]

If you are using Irssi, the terminal based IRC client, you might be interested in a nice script by Florian Ragwitz: backlog completion. Quoting from the script: backlog completion: enter a word prefix and press TAB – and the prefix will be expanded from all the words on the current channel on everything that was […]

clive is an open source command line tool to extract videos and to bypass the need to use Adobe Flash in order to view user-generated content available on video-sharing websites. It supports Youtube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Guba, Metacafe, Sevenload and Break. Its usage is as easy as: % clive ‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goTaNrLsny8’

moreutils by Joey Hess is a collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago. These tools are part of the moreutils suite: combine: combine the lines in two files using boolean operations ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output isutf8: check if a file or standard input is […]

If you want to become a Zsh poweruser you should make sure to effectively use keybindings. First of all: use ‘bindkey -e’ to to enable emacs style or ‘bindkey -v’ for vi style. If you don’t know what you should prefer: use emacs style. Execute ‘bindkey’ to get a list of currently active key bindings […]

dstat is a versatile resource statistics tool. Whereas you might know top (dynamic real-time view of a running system) mpstat (report processors related statistics), iostat (report Central Processing Unit (CPU) statistics and input/output statistics for devices and partitions) as well as vmstat (report virtual memory statistics) and slabtop (display kernel slab cache information in real […]

Emacs provides functions for working with rectangles. You just have to set the mark at one point of the rectangle (either C-Space or left click), go to another point of the rectangle (or right click) and then execute a rectangle function/command, like: C-x r k Kill the text of the region-rectangle (kill-rectangle) C-x r y […]