You can, however, exclude case from a grep to make it not case sensitive - simply add -i:

grep -i “Hello” textfile.txt

Alternatively, you could use it in conjunction with cat and tac (Reverse Cat)

cat textfile.txt | grep -i “Hello”

The above will find all lines containing “Hello” in textfile.txt, whether it’s “Hello”, “HELLO”, HElLO”, etc, making it much easier to find instances of “Hello” if you don’t really need to care about case.

(Read the article on Wikipedia about Case Sensitivity..)

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What’s a /28?  How many IPs do I get to use with a /26?  Well, see the table below!
Usable IPs is the Total IPs minus the Network and Broadcast IPs.

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I recommend that anyone running DNS services for any domain looks into these commands – they’re very useful, especially when you’re making changes.

dig has a feature which allows you to specify a name server along with the record you want to query.

For example, one of the DNS servers for droptips.com is “ns.123-reg.co.uk”.  We can query this server directly, for the www record by doing the following:

$ dig droptips.com @ns.123-reg.co.uk

You’ll get some output with a section titled Answer Section:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
 droptips.com.       86400   IN      A       89.238.134.5

This details the result (89.238.134.5) and also the TTL for the record (in seconds).  The TTL is important, as this is how long caching DNS servers should cache the result for – in this case, 86400 seconds which is 1 day. Using this command to find out a TTL value for a particular record is also quite useful, especially if you’re investigating DNS cache issues.

You can also do the same to check other records such as MX records, by simpling adding the record type to the command.  For example, to get the MX records ns1.google.com is reporting for google.co.uk:

$ dig MX google.co.uk @ns1.google.com

… with the results:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
 google.co.uk.           10800   IN      MX      10 google.com.s9a2.psmtp.com.
 google.co.uk.           10800   IN      MX      10 google.com.s9b1.psmtp.com.
 google.co.uk.           10800   IN      MX      10 google.com.s9b2.psmtp.com.
 google.co.uk.           10800   IN      MX      10 google.com.s9a1.psmtp.com.

You can see in this instance, that the TTL is 10800 seconds which is 3 hours, and all MX records have the same priority level of 10.

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I bought an iPhone 3GS just under a year ago (20th June 2009) and my data usage in that time has been just 908MB, sent and received.  That’s not much.  I do use WiFi when at home, though.

I have an Exchange push account (with quite a bit of mail flow), random other push apps, I use the browser quite a bit when out and about, I use the maps, and I send a fair few e-mails, often including pictures etc.  I’d say my use is fairly typical.

My average data use (none-WiFi data) a month is 75MB.  So, even if you doubled the use, it’s still only 150MB.  You could say you use data on your iPhone five times as much as me, and it’s still only 375MB a month!

The allowances are often quite high (for a phone) – I’d be surprised if you hit the limit (at time of this post) offered by the mobile companies, certainly in the UK, unless you’re tethering it and using it as a modem, or constantly streaming video such as YouTube etc.

What’s your data usage?  Let me know in comments below!

iPhone Data Usage

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Open a Command Prompt by going to Start and opening “cmd”. You will then be presented with a command prompt window, where you need to type the systeminfo command below:

C:\> systeminfo | find "System Boot Time"
System Boot Time:          05/06/2010, 12:55:07

You will then be shown the date and time the server was booted (as seen in the example above).

You can just run “systeminfo” on it’s own (with no ‘| find “System Boot Time”‘), and you will be presented with a lot of other information such as Hotfixes, Network Connections, etc.

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In Windows Server 2008, you can install it via the Server Manager GUI tool, but it is often quicker to install it via a command prompt/terminal.

So, open a cmd.exe session and run the following:

servermanagercmd -install telnet-client

And that’s it – once the command has completed, telnet.exe will be available from a command prompt.

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grep is a great tool to search for certain information in text files – but it can also exclude certain pieces of information which can be equally as useful.

So, for example, if I want to watch a log file using tail -f, but exclude any information relating to the IP address “192.168.1.101″ then we can use the grep -v switch:

tail -f access.log | grep -v "192.168.1.101"

What this will do is show everything, apart from a line with that IP address in.

Of course, this works with any other command with text being piped into grep:

cat file.txt | grep -v "heh"

This would output the contents of file.txt but remove any lines with “heh” in them.

You can find out more about the various grep options in it’s man page (man grep from the command line)

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Can I use Aero Glass on a remote Terminal Services/Remote Desktop session?

Well, with Windows Server 2008 R2, Yes you can!

It’s basically replicating the user experience you get locally of Aero Glass, on remote sessions.  It may be useful for task switching etc. Check the guide out below:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2009/06/23/aero-glass-remoting-in-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx

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The “Who’s PC has been on the longest without a reboot?” sort of challenges.

Well, finding out the uptime on an OS X machine is quite easy!

If you open a Terminal (by using Spotlight, then searching for Terminal or open Applications/Utilities and double click Terminal) and then type:

uptime

… so it looks something like this:

user@mac:~$ uptime
23:46  up 11:55, 3 users, load averages: 0.17 0.21 0.23

There is multiple parts of information from this command.  The part we’re focusing on is the second part:  ”up  11:55″.  This means that the machine I’m currently on has been booted up for 11 hours and 55 minutes.

So, what’s your uptime?  How often do you manually restart your computer?  Let me know via comments below!

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servermanagercmd -install powershell

Why use the GUI when the command line is much quicker?

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I use irssi for connecting to IRC – it’s an extremely configurable text based client, so I wanted a way to just ignore these DCC requests – I’ve never, ever used DCC in the 11 years I’ve used IRC, and, well, I can’t see myself starting either… so I might as well just ignore them all.

To ignore all DCC commands from anyone (*!*@*), simply type:

/ignore * DCC

And you should receive the message:

(11:24:00) Ignoring DCC from *

What this will do is ignore any DCC from anyone – you just won’t see the request coming in, which makes for a much tidier status window/channel window when someone starts getting a bit silly on IRC!

You may find that this command works in other IRC clients too – it’s a pretty standard feature, but exact syntax may vary.

You can also have exceptions if you want certain nick and hostmasks to be able to still send DCC (from your trusted sources).  More information is available here: http://static.quadpoint.org/irssi-docs/help-full.html#IGNORE

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No related posts were found, so here's a random post instead: Anti-Spam Functionality on the Hub Transport (Exchange).

You can, of course, right click on the application from the start menu and run as Administrator, but there’s also a keyboard shortcut:

Ctrl + Shift + (Click Mouse)

If you hold down the control key, the shift key and then click the application, it’ll run it with administrator privileges – you’ll probably get a prompt from User Account Control, letting you know what’s happening.  This works from both the start menu, the taskbar, and any icon.

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To access the command history of your current session, press “F7″ and you’ll be presented with a prompt containing the last commands you’ve executed.

Please note that it only shows you the command history from the current session.

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If you go to Start and search for “System Repair Disc“, it should find “Create a System Repair Disc”.

If you open the application, you’ll get a prompt box to burn the image to CD/DVD.  Choose your CD/DVD burner and click “Create disc”

If you do have any problems with your Windows 7 installation, booting from this disc allows you to perform a whole range of  features such as:

• Startup Repair
• System Restore
• System Image Recovery
• Windows Memory Diagnostics
• Command Prompt

So, for the cost of a single disc, you can have another option to help repair any future problems you may encounter.  Create one now!

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C:\> systeminfo | find "System Boot Time"
System Boot Time:          17/12/2009, 23:09:04

You will then be shown the date and time the server was booted (as seen in the example above).

You can just run “systeminfo” on it’s own (with no ‘| find “System Boot Time”‘), and you will be presented with a lot of other information such as Hotfixes, Network Connections, etc.

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There may be times when you have multiple, or even a single, screen session which you want to kill without attaching to it and ending it as you normally would.

You can kill a screen session using the session ID or the name (if the name is unique enough).

Warning: Both ways end all processes within the screen session, so if you have any open files/applications, make sure you don’t need/want them – they’ll be kill’d along with the session.

Killing by session ID

First, run screen -list to get the id of the current sessions (we use the id to kill the screen session)

daz@scampi:~$ screen -list
There are screens on:
11493.irssi     (04/01/10 16:25:44)     (Detached)
30784.newapps   (01/01/10 19:42:38)     (Detached)

As you can see in this example, I have two sessions, a session called “irssi” with id 11493, and a session called “newapps”, with an id of 30784.

So, to kill the “newapps” session, I’d run:

daz@scampi:~$ screen -X -S 30784 kill
daz@scampi:~$

.. and the session will now be gone.  You can verify that by running screen -list again.

Killing by session name

If your screen session name is unique enough (for example, if you have one called “newapps” and another called “irssi” as per my example) you can kill by name:

daz@scampi:~$ screen -X -S newapps kill
daz@scampi:~$

The reason I say unique enough –  if you have a session called “newapps” and one called “newapps1″, you will need to use the ID to end “newapps” before “newapps1″ – you’ll simply be asked to specify the session again otherwise.

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Whenever an OS X machine accesses a network share, it creates a .DS_Store file for it’s own use (on SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, and WebDAV servers).  These files are invisible to the OS X user, but will show up to anyone else using other operating systems such as Windows or a Linux distribution.

Turning them off is easy though, by running the following command:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

You will need to either log off or restart the computer for the changes to take affect.

For more information, please see the official knowledge base article here:  http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629

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But what if you remove that package at a later date that needed all of those dependancies?  You’ll probably find it’s left the dependancies installed.. and if you’ve not installed any other packages which also need those dependacies, they’re just taking up hard drive space.

It’s easy to remove them, though – after all, you no longer need them so why keep them?

The command is simple (and needs to be run as root):

apt-get autoremove

… and that’s it.  The man page entry for this command:

“autoremove is used to remove packages that were automatically installed  to satisfy dependencies for some package and that are no more needed.”

So the next time you install a package which needs lots of dependancies, and you decide you want to remove it for whatever reason, remember to run apt-get autoremove afterwards!

Warning: You do need to be careful when running this – always check which packages it’s proposing to uninstall before confirming.  I have seen reports of random packages being removed, breaking the entire system – even though it is an officially supported feature of apt-get, and it can be very useful, use it with caution.

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I’ve been running an Asus Seashell 1005HA (6-Cell Battery, 63Wh) with Windows 7 for some time now, and use it as my main machine 90% of the time.

Just as a side note, the only thing I have done is upgraded the RAM to 2GB (from the standard 1GB) by adding a single 1GB SO-DIMM to the Netbook.  For the cost and how easy it was, it was well worth the upgrade!

The Windows 7 Experience Index is often a good guide to see how a machine will perform (processor, memory (RAM), graphics, hard disk) – the results for this Netbook are below:

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I personally SSH to my remote servers and use command line tools such as Vim to edit files.  But you may not have SSH access, and only FTP access – in that case, you’d need to edit the files locally, open another application and upload them manually.

There are times though, when I like to use desktop applications such as Textmate to edit files remotely on various servers via SSH – but, of course, Finder and the applications on my computer wouldn’t be able to see them – until now!

Macfusion solves this problem.  Along with MacFUSE, it allows you to “mount” the remote server space you have as a normal network drive.  What this means is, if you go to File -> Open in any application locally, you’ll see the remote drive.  You’ll be able to see, copy, move, and even create new files directly on the remote server – infact, it acts exactly like any other drive would.

I’d highly recommend you take a look – both tools are free to download (the GUI and the underlying daemons) and I’ll guarantee once you start mounting your remote server space, you’ll wonder how you ever managed with older methods!

Macfusion: http://www.macfusionapp.org/about.html
MacFUSE:  http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

You’ll need both of the above.

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