Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

Blog

Category: sysadmin

Subversion svn:ignore propery doesn’t (seem) to work? [FIXED]

Say you’re trying to set the “ignore” property on something in a subversion checkout like this: svn propset svn:ignore “foo.pyc” . Next you do a svn status: M foo.pyc It seems it isn’t working. In order to fix this, you must remember to first: Remove the file from subversion and commit svn update all the […]

Stop Joomla (v2.5) from logging you out of the administrator interface

The Joomla v2.5 backend administrator interface by default will log you out after you’ve been inactive for 24 minutes (some on the internet claim it’s 15, others 30 minutes. For me, it seems it was 24). This is quite annoying, and usually easily fixed in most PHP applications by changing the session timeout. Joomla also […]

MobaXterm – (Free) All-in-one Xserver/SSH/Linux environment for Windows

I recently stumbled on MobaXterm. It’s a complete unix enviroment including X Server/SSH/Telnet/SCP/FTP client all in one. The list of features is impressive to say the least. This is an excellent replacement for Putty. A small selection of the most useful features: Free. What more is there to say? Tabs and Horizontal / Vertical split […]

Setting I/O priorities on Linux

All us system admins know about nice, which lets you set the CPU priorities of a process. Every now and then I need to run an I/O-heavy process. This inevitably makes the system intermittently unresponsive or slow, which can be a real annoyance. If your system is slow to respond, you can check to see […]

Persistent undo history in Vim

Once you quit Vim, the undo history for that file is gone. This sometimes gives me problems if I accidentally made a change in a file without knowing it. This usually happens due to a bad Vim command which, for instance, capitalized a single letter. There’s an option which allows you to make the undo […]

Conque: Terminal emulators in Vim buffers

For the longest time, I’ve searched for a way to run terminal emulators in Vim buffers. As a kind of work-around, I created Bexec, which allows you to run the current contents of a buffer through an external program. It then captures the output and inserts/appends it to another buffer. Although Bexec works reasonable, and […]

Re-use existing SSH agent (cygwin et al)

(Please note that this post is not specific to Windows nor Cygwin; it'll work on a remote unix machine just as well) On my netbook, I use Windows XP in combination with Cygwin (A unix environment for Windows) and Mintty for my Unixy needs. From there, I usually SSH to some unix-like machine somewhere, so […]

monit alerts not emailed: Resource temporarily unavailable

While setting up Monit, a tool for easy monitoring of hosts and services, I ran into a problem. I had configured Monit to email alerts to my email address, using my personal mail server (IP/email addresses obfuscated to protect the innocence of my email inbox): set mailserver 211.211.211.0 set alert ferry.boender@example.com set httpd port 2812 […]

The user isn’t always wrong

Some time ago, my mother bought a new laptop. It came preinstalled with Windows Vista, which proved to be quite the disaster. The laptop wasn’t nowhere near fast enough to run it, so I installed Ubuntu on it. This allowed my mom to do everything she needed to do with the laptop, while at the […]

Read the POSIX standard

Stop reading your local manual pages when programming/scripting stuff, and use the POSIX standard instead: Online POSIX 2008 (EEE Std 1003.1-2008) standard There are four main parts: The Base Definitions (XBD): The basics of a POSIX-compliant system. The System Interfaces (XSH): What POSIX-compliant systems offer to programs. I.e. programming in C (stdlib) The Shell & […]

The text of all posts on this blog, unless specificly mentioned otherwise, are licensed under this license.