Feb 052012
 

When you upgrade pacman, you will get a message that says “run pacman –init” and when you do from a console (like on a remote server), you will then be presented with the following message:

# pacman-key --init
gpg: Generating pacman keychain master key...
 
Not enough random bytes available.  Please do some other work to give
the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 282 more bytes)

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Jan 092012
 

One of the easiest ways to set up a subversion server that is lightweight is to use an existing linux server with sufficient free space available to hold your repositories.  This is much more lightweight because it really doesn’t require any additional software or services, outside of subversion which is likely already installed if you use the svn client; and ssh which is probably already installed and running.

I will give the steps I used for centos, but it will work with other linux distributions if you apply the correct package management steps (pacman, apt-get, yum, emerge, etc):

First, make sure we have subversion and openssh installed:

yum install subversion openssh-server

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May 052011
 

Did you ever wish you could start certain scripts only when you are bringing the network up and then stop them when bring the network down?

For the longest time, I was using wicd to manage network connections.  At some point and time I decided to take a look at NetworkManager.

Using network manager, you can use the dispatcher to run scripts based on network connection, runlevel, etc.

This is how I got it working in gentoo linux and a few example scripts.

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Apr 282011
 

So, sometimes I write scripts to be a quick way to monitor or audit other systems.  The following script was written as a way to quickly audit a list of domain names, i.e. from a list of 1 domain per line.  Initially it was used to audit a list of subdomains from a nettica account to see if the name still resolved and if so, determine if the server was running ssh with a valid key.  I have realized the script has a lot of uses, as a way to validate hosts are up and also validate ssh is running.  You could also replace the “ls” command in order to monitor other services on a server or even top or similar.  So, this script could start as a foundation and easily expanded upon.

First, you need a text file containing 1 domain name per line, like this:

domain1.com
domain2.com
domain3.com
sub.domain4.com

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