Mark Lamers {Linux} Experience

Why you should read changelogs ..

Mark — Wed, 06 May 2009 04:39:32 +0000

We were getting a new colleague at work. Always nice. Due to the fact we work on fedora machines and PC Maintenance only works with “the Other OS”, we maintain the babies ourselves. So by by, to fedora 8 and a fresh Fc 10 installation. Off course everything went very smoothly (waving to fedora maintainers and developers, a job well done!). But when I had to configure the xinerama screens I failed hopelessly. Always good to sit a moment and think off totally other things, like did Gaugain really cut of Vincent’s ear or is it just German propaganda.

And there it was “gnome-display-properties”! Without any xorg.conf hacking just clickertheclickclick dual screen setup.

I’m impressed works even with Ati drivers!

CentOS 5.3 with Directory Server

Mark — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:47:03 +0000

I used a fresh install of CebtOS 5.3

I used this Howto

The steps:
set FQDN cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ wget -q http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/CentOS-Testing.repo sed '/gpgkey/a exclude=java-1.7.0-icedtea \ priority=10' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Testing.repo sed '/gpgkey/a exclude=jpackage-utils' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo yum --enablerepo=c5-testing install centos-ds yum install xorg-x11-xauth bitstream-vera-fonts dejavu-lgc-fonts urw-fonts rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm (set priority) yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk /usr/sbin/alternatives --config java setup-ds-admin.pl chkconfig dirsrv on chkconfig dirsrv-admin on centos-idm-console -a http://localhost:9830

Break out of your jail

Mark — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:56:23 +0000

We all know the cumbersome situation behind a company firewall. Break out with “ssh -tX username@someaccessible_host -X username@notaccessible_host”. You can add another host inbetween as you like.

A handy bastard

Mark — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:12:53 +0000

^foo^bar runs the latest command and replaces foo with bar. That’s a smarty pants!

route and virt-manager

Mark — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 09:00:44 +0000

I basicly work all my testlabs with virt-manager (kvm). To make it possible to ssh direct into my VM i have to add a route to the VM-net. Goes like this:

route add -host 192.168.122.1 dev eth0

route add -net 192.168.122.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.122.1

command line tools [cp]

Mark — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:22:58 +0000

Problem with cp was how to copy all hidden files and hidden directories from a directory without copying the toplevel directory ” ..” . This is achieved by forcing a alphanumeric sign behind the first dot. Like this : cp -a ./.[A-Z,0-9]*

Command line tools [ls]

Mark — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:00:38 +0000

Here I will describe usage of the basic Linux command line tools.

LS ls is off course a very basic tool. It will show you the listing in a directory. “ls -C” will show you the column version output. “ls -A” will show you all but the toplevel dir and cwd dir presented by the “.” and “..”. That keeps scripts from complaining they can’t work on cwd. For instance if you do a:”
for file in $(ls -a); do rm -rf $file ; done”
You get a:
rm: cannot remove directory `.' rm: cannot remove directory `..'.
When you exclude “.” and “..” with an “-A” all is well.

Been there done that, failed it

Mark — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:49:43 +0000

Last Friday (the 13 th) I failed my first try off the RHCE exam. I had no chance at all. The pressure was to much for me, and i had to use to much RTFM. There is no time for that in the exam.

That is why I created this page. To describe my own learning history, maybe its usefull for someone else.