linux
Linux is a great OS, don't you think? I know I do - and here is a list of stuff about linux such as tips on use and useful software.
Bash script to find most common 404
Following Kevin Hankens post on why you shouldn't ignore Drupal 404 errors, I decided to go through yesterdays error_log on our live apache server (the one which hosts www.pponline.co.uk, www.sportbusiness.com and www.mychild.co.uk alongside around 40 other dupral sites).
Generate Entropy for GnuPG
Has anyone every tried to generate a GPG (or GnuPG) key? I have… and I received this error…
Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 284 more bytes)
Patching can cause permission denied errors
I just updated this server to PHP 5.3. As all my sites are Drupal 6 it seems I have a few issues ahead which mean I need to patch Drupal to stop PHP complaining about deprecated stuff…
So I headed over to the post on drupal.org which is discussing 5.3 compatibility in Drupal 6 (which I personally think SHOULD go in) to grab a patch. I applied the patch with no problems. I refreshed a page and got a white screen so I checked the logs only to see…
Indenting in Vim
Ever had that situation where you've enabled :set paste and pasted in hundred of lines of code into vim only to see it all fully left aligned? I just did… And bugger going over each line and manually indenting it! Want know how to indent a visual block of text?
How to use "sed" to find and replace
After Worldpay recently changed to use the RBS system, I was tasked with finding every instance of select.worldpay.com/wcc/purchase in our forms and replacing it with select.wp3.rbsworldpay.com/wcc/purchase. There appeared to be thousands of files and I wasn't going to do it manually…
Backing up a Drupal Database: Redux
Back in November last year, I wrote a script which handled backing up a drupal database. There were quite a few comments and I've taken some on board and developed the script on a little further to be more "generic".
One of the main complaints/suggestions about my previous snippet was the hard coded nature of it. The follow script offers far more configuration through the command line itself.
I'm a lazy linux piper
This morning I updated a site to the latest release of Drupal 5.16. Nothing special there at all. I've done that many times as has (hopefully) mabye other drupal devs… However, I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to SVN. Didn't I mention this drupal site was in an SVN repository? ;-)
So, I've svn copy'd the trunk to an "update_to_5.16" branch, checked out this branch and done a cvs up -dP -r DRUPAL-5-16. Everything is going according to plan so far. Next I run svn status to get a list of files which I need to mark as added or deleted (or to list anything else which has gone wrong). What happens next is I get a list of hundreds of CVS Template files which have been added to the CVS folders. For example…
Neat commenting in Vim
I am a bit of a "neat geek" when it comes to coding. Things should be indented neatly and should have well laid out comments! Why? Well… It's easy to do and in 6 months time when you look at your code you will appreciate it! It will also me even more appreciated by another developer in less than 6 months time ;-)
Finding the largest files in a folder
I just needed to find the largest files in a folder (in an attempt to find out why it was so bloody huge!) and have ended up with the following handy combination of commands…
find /path/to/folder -size +1M -print0 | xargs -0 du -h | sort -nr
OpenSuse 11.0 Issues
After about 4 days of using OpenSUSE 11.0, I'm not overly impressed with it in comparison to RedHat Enterprise 3/4/5, CentOS 5, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.x (other distro's I've used). OpenSUSE has some annoying habits and default/unusual configurations…
Backing up a Drupal Database
I was just dumping a database using mysqldump and I noticed that tables such as cache (and its cousins cache_page, cache_menu, etc), sessions and watchdog can be pretty big and are also not often essential for backing up. I mean, when you restore your web site do you really care about restoring people's logged in sessions from when the backup took place? I can understand maybe keeping watchdog; but then again should you lose your site you would probably lose it several hours after the backup so would miss out on any relevant watchdog notices.
Anywho… I did a mysqdump for a large database for a website I maintain and the dump came out at 400Mb. I then spent a few minutes cobling together a small script which would do a mysqldump but had some pre-programmed Regular Expressions to match specific groups of tables which it would only dump the structure for (ie, no data). After running this script, the SQL dump was only 220Mb. Much better! It also runs considerable quicker too and will cause less table locking.
So - the script?
SVN + NFS = svn nfs cant get exclusive lock
Last night I was trying to configure SVN on a server. The setup was that the SVN Repo was on "srv2" and the frontend and code I wanted to import was on "srv1".
I created an NFS share on srv2 and mounted it on srv1 in /mnt/svnroot. The mount worked perfectly and I could touch and remove files from srv1.
So I tried to create a "sites" folder where I wanted to import a site I wanted to version control. This is where I started to have problems… The sollution was to add "nolock,bg" to the mount options on the client. Read on for more details!
List enabled services in Linux
Today I needed to list all of the services which were enabled on boot-up for one of the servers I maintain. Obviously, my first port of call was to use the nifty tool ChkConfig like so…
Using Tar and SSH to improve SCP Speeds
I am currently in the process of migrating several dozen sites between two servers. I tried using scp command to copy the sites over however scp is a very slow command when transferring many small files.
I did a little research on how to use tar over an ssh connection and realised that you could specify the stdout on tar.
Vim and Drupal Modules
I just finished upgrading a server to Ubuntu 8.04 which came with Vim 7.1 rather than 6.3 on the older server. It seems 7.1 does things slightly differently to 6.3.
In 6.3 I could create ~/.vim/filetype.vim and in there define a line as follows:
au BufRead,BufNewFile *.module,*.install,*.theme setf php
However in 7.1, it looks like a line similar to this has to go into ~/.vimrc instead…
Removing trailing spaces with vim
After recently reading about how great VIM is for the three hundredth and fifty second time (I kept count), I decided to take a look.
It really is quite cool! I've also decided to try to log any cool tips I learn about it. Here is the first which I found after running the coder module on one of my modules (Page Title 2) and it threw hundreds of errors about too many trailing spaces on empty lines.
Getting Lighttpd working with AWStats
Following my previous post about configuring Lighttpd on this VPS Webserver to replace Apache I bring you a guide to configuring AWStats under Lighttpd. This process is differs to Apache as control of directories and aliasing is handled differently. There can also be complications if you have previously enabled the Drupal LUA Magnet script on your site for clean URL handling!
How to batch rename files
This afternoon I needed to rename a bunch of files from one form to another in a command shell… Well technically I didn't need to do it in a shell - but, as sure as there is a hole in my ass, I wasn't gonna go through renaming them all manually!
They needed to go from, for example, add.png to add_32.png. After a little research into commands like printf, awk, bison and so on - I suddenly realized that 'cut' held the key!
Powered by Lighttpd
This blog is now no longer powered by Apache (the feature filled but slightly bloated beast), instead I have decided to give Lighttpd (pronounced Lighty) a whirl.
What convinced me? Ages ago I read an article by Dries Buytaert comparing webserver configurations. It was shocked to see that Lighttpd appeared to be able to serve almost twice as many pages per second as Apache. There is also the advantage that a static file will only cost you substantially less memory to serve in Lighty than it will in Apache due to Apache bundling ALL the mods into every process.
So what is Lighttpd? The inventors describe it perfectly…
How much memory am I using?
Following on from my previous post about how to check how many apache processes are running - I recently wanted to find out exactly how much memory my applications where using… So I did a little research and found a few new and useful commands!
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