Few Tools Worth a Look

Check X memory usage

$ xrestop

Check system memory usage

$ top

Create CD Image using DD

This is a simple way to create image from CD or any other block devices under linux.

$ dd if=/dev/cdrom0 of=output.iso

Change cdrom0 with devices you need to make image from, and output.iso with image file result.

To mount it, use

$ mount -o loop output.iso /path/to/mntdir

Linux Screen Cheatsheet

Open new screen

$screen

Print a list of pid.tty.host of screen identification

$screen -ls

Reattach/resume screen session

$screen -r pid.tty.host

Detach a screen

ctrl-a d

Adding Key to Ubuntu

Sometime when you do apt-get update, ubuntu will complain about key not available. For example

...
Fetched 69.7kB in 50s (1,388B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net karmic Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 5A9BF3BB4E5E17B5
$

To solve the error, you just need to install the key using this command

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keryserver keyserver.ubuntu.com <public key number>

Change public key number with the one ubuntu complained. In this example it would be 5A9BF3BB4E5E17B5.

$sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keryserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 5A9BF3BB4E5E17B5
Executing: gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /etc/apt/secring.gpg --trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 5A9BF3BB4E5E17B5
gpg: requesting key 4E5E17B5 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key 4E5E17B5: public key "Launchpad PPA for chromium-daily" imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
$

Continue with update.

Install PostgreSQL8.4 in Karmic

From terminal type

$sudo apt-get install postgresql

answer yes to all questions.
You may also want to install pgAdmin III. It good tool to manage PostgreSQL especially if you are a beginner. In terminal type

$sudo apt-get install pgadmin3

again, just answer yes to the questions.
To begin using postgre, you need to set postgre user password.

$sudo -u postgres psql postgres
enter your password.
psql (8.4.2)
Type "help" for help.


postgres=# \password postgres
Enter new password:
Enter it again:
postgres=# CREATE DATABASE database_name;
CREATE DATABASE
postgres=# \quit

done. Refer to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostgreSQL for complete tutorial.

Display Services Running on Linux and Their Port

In linux, you can easily check which services are running and their corresponding port. Use command

$ cat /etc/services

Pipe it to grep to get particular program, instead of browsing the results. For example, to search which port Postgre running you use

$ cat /etc/services | grep postgre

postgresql  5432/tcp   postgres   # PostgreSQL Database
postgresql  5432/udp   postgres
$

You can see that postgresql is listening to port 5432. Of course there are many other ways around. This is just one of them.

Dbase Driver For Java

On our last project, we migrated legacy application, which based on FoxPro Dos to Java and Postgre database. For some reasons, we could not migrate all at once.  Instead, we wrote java app first to connect to legacy database (dbf). Then later, change the database to Postgre.

After days of search we came accross to this driver by Hongxin Technology & Trade Ltd. of Xiangtan City. It was not free though but it works.

Connecting to database was easy. It just like any other jdbc drivers out there. It supports subdirectory reading, idx, ndx, etc. In addition, the driver allows you to set as server mode, poolable connection on many application servers. For complete features please refer to faq.

Although it mainly works, we have a bit complain. It's slow. Maybe the problem lies on underlaying database file, i am not sure about this. Lack of documentations prevent us to do driver optimization.

Overall, it is a good product.

Monitoring File Changes on Linux 2

Referring to my previous post Monitoring File Changes on Linux, there is other alternative to do it

#! /bin/sh

# This is the log that will be monitored. 
# If any changes occur to this, then take appropriate action.
MONITORED_LOG=/tmp/goreb.log

# We will need this log to see whether any changes occured to /tmp/goreb.log
TEMP_LOG=/tmp/.goreb.log.1

# This is a 1-time command i.e. create the log file if it does nto exist.
[ ! -f $TEMP_LOG ] && touch -r $MONITORED_LOG $TEMP_LOG

[ $MONITORED_LOG -nt $TEMP_LOG ] && echo "$MONITORED_LOG is newer than $TEMP_LOG. Carry out your required operations"

# Update $TEMP_LOG with the new modified date of $MONITORED_LOG
touch -r $MONITORED_LOG $TEMP_LOG

Monitoring File Changes on Linux

This is a copy of article from http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/watchdir.html (Copyright Anthony Lawrence, used by permission) In case the original link dead, I can still look at it.

Many modern systems provide a way to watch a directory for events (new files, reading the directory, modification of a file in the directory, etc.). This facility can be done in various ways, from providing hooks in the filesystem code itself to something that watches for inode changes. Linux and BSD have several possibilities in that regard, including dnotify ( replaced by inotify), changedfiles, watch, Gamin and fam.

Mac OS X has FileMonitor (shareware), FSEvents and it's certainly possible that some of the BSD tools might compile on OS X. But what do you do when there is no support in the OS?

Brute Force

Typically you are interested in new files in a particular directory. You can do something like this:

touch /tmp/testdirb.$$
while true
do
ls /testdir > /tmp/testdira.$$
diff /tmp/testdira.$$ /tmp/testdirb.$$ || echo "changed"
cp /tmp/testdira.$$ /tmp/testdirb.$$
sleep 300
done 

If you were looking for a particular file to change, you'd use "ls -l", and if your interest was in if the file was being used or executed, "ls -lut" would give you that. This example justs echoes when something changes, but you would more likely call some other script that did more testing. One obvious issue that comes up if a file has been created is waiting for the creating program to have finished up: lsof or fuser can help you with that.

But this is all pretty crude. Sometimes crude is fine, but if you need to know more often, there's a fair amount of overhead in this that you really don't need.

If it is just one file, and your interest is additions to it, the mailchecking utility in your shell can give you alerts. For example, in Linux bash:

MAIL=/tmp/watchthis
MAILCHECK=10

You can watch multiple files, each with its own message, by using MAILPATH instead of MAIL. You need to "unset MAIL", and set and export MAILPATH:

unset MAIL
MAILPATH='/tmp/foo/h?"H is changed":/tmp/foo/a?"A has changed"'
export MAILPATH 

Stat

Linux systems have a command line "stat" that can make checking changes a little less intensive. "stat -t testdir" looks something like this:

testdir 4096 8 41ed 5001 5001 303 82022 2 2b 1d 1070127877 1070128608 1070128608

which is everything you want to know about the file or directory for this purpose. Security Enhanced Linux versions add another field which we need to strip out for our purposes here:

OLD=`stat -t testdir`
# OLD=`stat -t testdir | sed 's/[0-9][0-9]*$//'`  # if SE linux stat
while true
do
NEW=`stat -t testdir`
# NEW=`stat -t testdir | sed 's/[0-9][0-9]*$//'`  if SE linux stat
[ "$NEW" == "$OLD" ] || echo "changed!"
sleep 3
done

You could get fancier by splitting out the fields into separate variables. That isn't a lot of fun at the shell level, so we'll move up a notch.

Perl or C

From Perl or C (and of course many other languages), you can get access to the stat information a bit more easily. Here's a simple Perl example like those already given:

#!/usr/bin/perl
@info=stat("testdir") or die "Can't stat testdir $!";
while (1) {
@newinfo=stat("testdir") or die "Can't stat testdir $!";
@what=qw(Device Inum Mode Links Owner Group Rdev Size Atime Mtime Ctime PBlock Blocks);
$x=0;
while ($info[$x]) {
  system("/bin/echo $what[$x] $info[$x] $newinfo[$x]") if ($info[$x] ne $newinfo[$x]);
  $x++;
}
@info=@newinfo;
sleep 1;
}

How to Create a DIY Photo Album: 10 steps (with pictures) - wikiHow

How to Create a DIY Photo Album: 10 steps (with pictures) - wikiHow

Is it just me ?

Today, I installed Firefox 3 for mac. Installation as usually run smothly, without any problems. Curious at how good firefox 3 run ( as some site claim) as I started firefox.
First, i went to goal.com ( yeah... i love football a lot). This site come with pretty much multimedia stuffs. They have flash content, java script and a lot of images. The page render quite fast and render correctly, I must say. But then after couple more tab opened, I feel firefox actually run slower than safari. I dont know if it's just me or crappy connection. Probably I need real benchmark to test those 2 browser.
One thing to note, ajax related site run much slower than safari. But again, real benchmark will tell.
Aside from that, I still love firefox than safari. Probably because i get too used with firefox since i still use window and linux.

First Word

Here i am, finally start my first blog. Well, not actually first time. I created blog about 2 years back... but then never continue writing. It was either too lazy too write nor i realized i was not good at writing, not to mention my poor English.

Then, It just happen today. I think I should start writing something. Like some old saying "Big Journey starts with small steps". So here goes ...