dufault.info

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

Billix

I  wanted to mention that I’ve been looking for something like for this a bit — a USB key that comes with a way to install multiple Linux distributions.  While at work, we primarily use Gentoo, we still have a Ubuntu server or CentOS install to do occasionally, and it would be nice to have [...]

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 [...]

Typespeed

It came up in IRC today that there was a typing game called typespeed — one of the categories is “Unix Commands.”  Better yet, this supports head to head networking mode, so you can play against people in your office, I didn’t even need to edit my firewall configuration on Ubuntu.
Playing your coworkers is good [...]

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 [...]

Gnome Do

I use Ubuntu at work, and today one of my coworkers linked me to Gnome Do:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomeDo
I remember seeing it a few weeks ago, but was busy with something and brushed it off.  Now, I’ve installed it and played with it some — it’s awesome.  Kind of like launchy for Windows, but on steriods.
Give it [...]

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

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 [...]