Sometimes it seems syslog is determined to spam the tty’s with useless information from the system logs. This happens on some systems, and I have yet to figure out why, because I do mostly the same install on all of them. Anyway, here’s how to get the damn things to stay in the log and not spam the console.

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There are loads of irssi scripts which do this, but the truth is irssi actually supports these things very well out of the box. Here’s how. Continue Reading »

stolen from http://www.harshj.com/2007/02/06/configuring-the-broadcom-2045a-bluetooth-dongle-in-windows/ for personal reference Continue Reading »

Today I found out I want to replace one of my 20″ 4:3 LCD screens with a widescreen, to watch movies on a bigger surface. However, I didn’t want to reduce my vertical screen space.

What I mean is that a 20″ widescreen is, necessarily, shorter vertically than my 4:3 screen, meaning I get to see less of vertically oriented webpages, word documents, spreadsheets… basically everything except movies are designed for a screen with a relatively large vertical size.

Thus, getting a 20″ widescreen was completely out of the question. So I grabbed my calculator, and then thought… why bother? Someone must have done this before.

Exactly. The link below provides a “TV Aspect Ratio Calculator”, which works just as well for LCD screens. Using 20″, 4:3 as input, my widescreen needs to be 24.5392 inches to fit my needs. Thus, we’re going for 26″

http://www.nicetaco.com/tv.aspx

For personal reference, this is where the damn pins go

Simple reference, moving a mysql database:

mysqldump -h <oldhostip/name> -u username -p[<password>] <databasename> > <dumpfilename>.sql
mysql -u<username> -p[<password>] < <dumpfilename>.sql

Note: The lack of spaces in some places of the commands. They are intended.
Note: Specifying the password after -p is []‘d, which means it’s optional.
Note: If you do enter a password on the command line, it will get saved in your .bash_history or similar in clear text.

debian-archive-keyring up to date? still get the error?

here’s a tip: try without a transparent proxy (i had to flush the cache on mine)

On a few systems, I’ve noticed CIFS mounts have a tendency to lock up the system when transferring large files, or a shitload of small ones in quick succession. When this happens, the system may or may not completely lock up, and lines like these will appear in your syslog:

Aug 1 22:58:16 dreadnought kernel: CIFS VFS: No response to cmd 46 mid 25661  Continue Reading »

											

On machines which are set up to have no local mail and send all their messages to a smarthost, using e.g. exim4, the “No mail.” message at login is both unnecessary and annoying, because when things are set up correctly, there should never be any local mail in the first place.

This can be remedied by editing /etc/pam.d/ssh (or whichever file corresponds to the login method you’re using) and taking a look at the two following lines:

# Print the status of the user's mailbox upon successful login.
session optional pam_mail.so standard noenv # [1]

It’s time to comment something out

On my Mac Mini, the hardware clock was seriously screwed up under Debian. The clock would set itself 1 hour back for each boot and cause all kinds of strange issues with cron when corrected. A small fix will remedy this situation.

1. sudo vim /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh

2. change ‘HWCLOCKPARS=’ to ‘HWCLOCKPARS=”–directisa”‘ (note: that’s two dashes before directisa, even if your browser might put them together)

3. On Debian Lenny, you have to do the same to the HWCLOCKPARS line in /etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh