Silly downtime

June 17th, 2008 • linux

Server was down and out for about 4 hours today due to a faulty kernel configuration not loading the proper RealTek driver for eth0 and eth1. Bryan at LSN had to get over to the DC and console in to get it manually loaded. Got that fixed and got the proper kernel booting again and now the reverting hostname issue has been fixed as well. Yay.

Bounced mail

May 4th, 2007 • linux

Seems the genius admins at my hosting company got on my server last night “upgrade perl” which apparently also meant updating Cpanel…breaking email in the process. I’ve got it fixed now however, I may be in the market for a new company soon given the historical lack of intelligence on their behalf.

Finally, hibernation works!

April 22nd, 2007 • linux

So this weekend I took it upon myself to upgrade my aging (but efficient) install of Ubuntu 6.06 to 7.04 and it went without a hitch after I did a custom install since the default one did not work surprisingly.

But now I have two things I was yearning for that without a lot of unruly work: hibernation support and my onboard SD card reader works. The SD card reader would have worked if I’d updated to 2.6.18 or higher (I’m using the generic 2.6.20-15 kernel for now) and I really missed having that function but I was able to live without it since I have another 8-in-1 reader. However, hibernation/suspend support was another story. I’d compiled 2.6.17 by hand and patched in suspend2 support and it sort of worked. I could drop X and manually `sudo hibernate` but it would never restore correctly so I never used it. The kernel was the easy part, getting the actual suspend2 source to work nicely with my system was another ordeal entirely. So now with the upgrade to 7.04 both work flawlessly out of the box. This alone is enough justification for my to have upgraded even though I now have to use the atrocious GNOME desktop environment. I really miss ion3 and its uber efficient keyboard shortcuts.

Oh well, everything works like a charm now and I’m still trying to figure out the stupid workspace switching shortcuts (they’re not very user-friendly unfortunately) but I’ll just end up changing them soon anyway.

Surfraw isn’t browsing the ‘net without a condom

March 28th, 2007 • bash, linux, web

About a month ago, my friend livinded introduced me to an infinitely helpful program for using in Bash or any other Linux shell: surfraw. Surfraw is an excellent tool to search for just about anything on the internet straight from the comfort of your shell. Installing it from source is as easy as unpackaging the source, running `./configure && make && make install`. Installing from Debian or Ubuntu is even easier as you can merely type `sudo aptitude install surfraw` and you’re done. Once it’s installed, all that’s left is to run `surfraw-update-path` and you’re ready to use it after you start another shell session.

I find this tool incredibly helpful because I use bash…a lot. I normally have two shells open that I’m currently working with and it’s so nice to be able to type `rfc 821` and have the original SMTP RFC pop up in Firefox on one of my multiple viewports (or virtual desktops for you non-Linux folks). This lets me work unhindered on what I was doing without having to stop, switch to the other desktop, pull up www.rfc-editor.org and search for 821, then go back to whatever I was doing in shell on the *other* desktop. This way, the RFC is ready for me when I need to reference it and it’s on another viewport so it’s non-distracting and unhindering to what I’m currently doing.

As you can see from the SourceForge site, surfraw has a ton of sensible options already built-in (google, yahoo, rfc, ask jeeves, etc. etc.) and adding new ones is very simple if you feel comfortable adding some shell code. I’ve written a few scripts like this in the past that were very much application-specific so I may end up adding those functions into surfraw’s elvi (the author’s oddball name for sites to search) for future use.

If you find yourself switching between a terminal window and your browser very often to look something up, I highly advise downloading surfraw to more streamline your tasks.