dufault.info

Ramblings of a phone weenie, Linux sysadmin, and other things geeky

Check out my new article on itnewb: Easy Logins With SSH On Linux!

I wrote an article for a friends site, check it out: Guide To Easy Logins With SSH On Linux
I didn’t know that article writing took so long — the amount of writing, rewriting, critiquing, etc etc was a new experience. I’ll have to keep writing articles — teaching others is a good way to [...]

Logging all BASH commands to history, and keeping people from deleting/emptying it

Usually on Linux server, we have issues with logging the commands that our users are running, especially with BASH. BASH doesn’t log the commands as soon as they’re executed, and the user can do a number of simple things to prevent the log from ever being written to the disk, preventing you from knowing [...]

Hotswap a SCSI, SAS, or SATA drive in Linux

There seems to be not a lot of information on Google about this, thus, I post.
At my work, the majority of our servers have hot-swappable drive bays — however, Linux doesn’t usually automatically notice the drive is gone. Worse, sometimes it doesn’t even notice new drives hooked up.
Now, SCSI and SAS both support hot-plugging [...]

The Linux Magic SysRq key

I find it shocking how many people don’t know about this neat Linux key combination that let’s you execute various low level commands regardless of the system’s state (as long as it’s running and hasn’t panicked.)
From the Wikipedia page:
It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem.
How [...]

Forcibly Triggering a Kernel Panic on Linux

This might sound strange, as people usually want to fix or prevent these from happening, I’m trying to test/ create a method of logging kernel panic messages to a remote logging server. All of the existing tutorials I found on the net were for Linux 2.4, or were incomplete.
My method involves creating a Linux [...]

A better way to find your BIOS version in Linux

Run this awesome command as root:
dd if=/dev/mem bs=32768 skip=31 count=1 | strings -n 10 | grep -i bios
Also, you can use dmidecode, but this can vary on motherboards what the search string is. On my machine right now:
phil@phil:~$ sudo dmidecode -s bios-version
ASUS M2NPV-VM ACPI BIOS Revision 1103

A Script to Remux MKV Videos Into MP4 Videos

I’ve written a script that dumps the audio and video from an mkv file, encodes the audio into a two channel AAC stream, and remuxes the audio/video into a MP4 wrapper so it’s playable on the Xbox 360. The script is Linux-only, obviously, written in bash using mplayer, normalize-audio, mencoder, MP4Box, mkvinfo, and mkvextract [...]