Thursday, March 23, 2006

My sysadmin toolbox

Inspired by linux.com :-)

For my day to day network administration, I use these apps frequently:

ssh,telnet,bash,coreutils,rsync,scp,elinks,wget,nano....if you don't know what
are these apps for, then probably you could skip this
*cough*article*cough* :-)
For serial console access, I use minicom. I love configuring my huawei box
with minicom using transparent konsole, it's so damn pretty.
For quick traffic monitoring via snmp poll, I use ifstat. If only I could
figure out how to parse the capture result into rrd files, I would make it
even more useful.
For more comperehensive network provisioning, JFFNMS is what I use. I just
wonder how to reduce its resource usage. I'll probably give nagios a shot
someday.

The others will be most of what GNOME & KDE offers....

100.000 km milestone

The odometer of my motorbike has just passed 100.000 kms milestone :-)
The odometer itself, however, consists of 5 digit only,
hence, its returned to ZERO :-D

Time to sell the bike eh?

j/k

Friday, March 17, 2006

Merah Putih

What makes a nation, nation?
no...I think the question should be ...
What keeps a nation, nation?

...

Are we really still a nation... or perhaps... we never was...?!

Aliases

Going into bash, aliases make my life easier, really!
I kept adding these aliases in wherever .bashrc I have

someone@somewhere:~$ alias
alias acs='apt-cache search'
alias acso='apt-cache show'
alias dusk='du -s -k -c * | sort -rn'
alias greph='history | grep '
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias nsl='netstat -alnp --protocol=inet | grep -v CLOSE_WAIT | cut -c-6,21-94
| tail +2'
alias sadug='sudo apt-get dist-upgrade'
alias sapi='sudo apt-get install'
alias sapu='sudo apt-get update'
alias sapup='sudo apt-get upgrade'
someone@somewhere:~$

As you can see... it's very ubuntu, right? :-)
I think I need to add some more...
Any idea ?

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Messing up with debmirror

From debmirror manpages:

DEBMIRROR(1) User Contributed Perl Documentation DEBMIRROR(1)

NAME
debmirror - Debian partial mirror script, with ftp, http, hftp or rsync
and package pool support

SYNOPSIS
debmirror [options] mirrordir

DESCRIPTION
This program downloads and maintains a partial local Debian mirror. It
can mirror any combination of architectures, distributions, and sec‐
tions. Files are transferred by ftp, and package pools are fully sup‐
ported. It also does locking and updates trace files.

To support package pools, this program mirrors in three steps.

1. download Packages and Sources files
First it downloads all Packages and Sources files for the subset of
Debian it was instructed to get.

2. clean up unknown files
Any files and directories on the local mirror that are not in the
list are removed.

3. download everything else
The Packages and Sources files are scanned, to build up a list of
all the files they refer to. A few other miscellaneous files are
added to the list. Then the program makes sure that each file in
the list is present on the local mirror and is up-to-date, using
file size (and optionally md5sum) checks. Any necessary files are
downloaded.


I had never paid attention step two before I tried to add breezy-updates and breezy-security, into my existing Ubuntu Breezy repository. I executed debmirror without putting breezy in the dist parameter (instead, only breezy-updates and breezy-security), hence, I lost 11 Gigs of data.

Mental note: RTFM RTFM RTFM