I know I’m going to forget how to do this, because I only ever need to do it once a year or something, so I’ll put it here for safe keeping: To recover a file from svn that you deleted from your local repository, it’s first necessary to get the proper name of the file,…
Category: Sysadmin
With Great Funding Comes Great Responsibility
For the past ~6 weeks, I’ve been talking to people, getting buy-in, educating users and administrators, and generating copious amounts of project proposal and six sigma documentation presentig VMware Infrastructure as an infrastructure building and management tool. There’s a whole manifesto behind this, but I’ll try to boil it down. Basically, this client has three…
Sometimes it’s just about attitude
Today I spent the day completely breaking down and replacing the entire above-ground portion of my in-ground pool’s plumbing. I had some problems crop up with my multi-port valve, and I had to take a few things apart to troubleshoot and remove the pump as the source of a pressure problem (namely, there wasn’t any)….
Two ssh-isms I forgot today
1. To remove an offending known_hosts key without opening the file or using sed or whatever, you can just run ssh-keygen -R <hostname>, which will remove any and all keys for the given hostname (see man ssh-keygen for other options like this). 2. To copy files from a local directory with spaces in its name…
UNIX mtime vs. ctime
Sometimes I get questions from people about stuff that I’ve long since taken for granted. One is “what’s the difference between mtime and ctime?” The answer is simple, but I wanted to post it here in case it can help anyone. In UNIX: mtime is “modification time”, and it is the time at which the…
New Job!
I started a new job about 6 weeks ago. I’m now doing infrastructure architecture at http://gfdl.noaa.gov GFDL stands for Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. It’s a NOAA site that supports atmospheric and climatology research. So in other words, the work I do supports research into things ranging from global warming to what the atmosphere on Mars…
On the demise of SysAdmin Magazine
CMP recently announced that they will cut 200 jobs, and shut down more than one magazine in the process, folding their content into other existing magazines. There has been a lot of buzz in the sysadmin community (which I know largely as a loose collection of people who belong to LOPSA, SAGE, USENIX, or local…
Regular Expressions with Python’s “re” Module
If you’re moving over from PHP, Perl, Ruby or something similar, don’t be intimidated by all the Python regular expression documentation. It doesn’t really have to be complicated or even all that much different from Perl (though it can be, if you want to go there). Here’s a search and replace I ripped out of…
Using TRUNCATE to empty a PostgreSQL database
This is not something that’s any big hack or secret, but emptying a database of all data without dropping the structure along with it is one of those tasks that I do just often enough in my development work to be annoying. If you ask me, there should just be a big ol’ “EMPTY” statement…
Thumbs up for Synergy
I have heard a couple of people mention this tool on IRC and mailing lists, but I didn’t ever make time to try it myself for some reason. That is, until my buddy and coworker Steve gave me a quick demo of its functionality, and told me that it was brainless to install and get…