Posts in “Other Tech”

Microsoft SQL 2012 SSIS Create Catalog Password

24 Dec 2013

Creating an SSIS Catalogue on Microsoft SQL 2012 seems to have an interface bug - you need to both “enable CLR” and provide an “encryption password”, but the options are mutually exclusive ie when I tried to type in a password, the interface locks the password fields.

Migrating from Palm to Android

16 Jan 2012

My venerable [Palm Treo 550][1] is showing it’s age ([as is the company][2]), so I’ve been looking for a new phone platform to migrate to for a few years. And since I’m now working for Google, Android is the obvious choice ([dog-fooding][3] and all that).

ssh, sudo, tty, shell

14 Jul 2011

A nice little script snippet I like to remember for automating quick stuff across multiple hosts. -t forces tty (so sudo will work); -q quiet – disable banners; -c script (“command”) to su. Presumes sudo doesn’t prompt for a password; otherwise, see [Expect][1] and [Exploring Expect][2] :-)

git hooks – prepare-commit-msg

22 Jun 2011

When I’m working with git, I like being able to see a list of files that have changed (new, modified, deleted, etc) in the commit message. So when I do a git log, rather than getting this:

Solaris – max of 100 cron jobs

9 May 2011

I stumbled across a limitation feature behaviour of Solaris over the weekend – by default it only allows you to run a maximum of 100 cron jobs at once. I suppose this to protect against “shooting oneself in the head”, but aaaarghhh. Reminds me why I love Monday mornings.

Python, Lambda, Closures

5 Apr 2011

A very interesting [post][2] from André Pang about some issues he came across with lamdas and closures in Python. Well, interesting to me because I’m playing with Lisp and Python at the moment.

Resize Terminal in Solaris

13 Feb 2011

Sometimes when connecting into a Solaris box via multiple jumps eg Citrix to putty to jumphost to target host, the terminal can get confused about screen size and scramble the output.

The RAID5 Write Hole

14 Jan 2011

The latest edition of the venerable [UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook]1 has a good section discussing the “RAID5 Write Hole”:

password caching with sshpass

28 Sep 2010

[sshpass][1] – a tool for non-interactively performing password authentication with SSH’s so called “interactive keyboard password authentication” – useful for automation scripts where you are unable to use ssh keys.

Windows autologon

23 Jun 2010

The only time I use Windows is as a virtual machine “appliance” ie it’s running some application that I have to run, that only runs on Windows.

vim folding

30 Mar 2010

A concise [article][1] on Linux.com (that I keep referring back to) about vim folding.

Ruby 1.9 shell aliases

19 Oct 2009

I’ve started playing with Ruby 1.9 – the latest and greatest version of Ruby. On Ubuntu Jaunty, 1.8 is considered mainline and 1.9 experimental – here are the shell aliases if using 1.9:

Ruby, Struct, OpenStruct, hashes

10 Oct 2009

An interesting Ruby example of an easy way to setup classes that are really just for passing around data using Struct – essentially a neat wrapper around a hash of values:

Oracle RMAN backups

29 Jun 2009

More notes on Oracle RMAN backups, see also [Oracle – how to purge old RMAN backups][1]. Thanks Raoul for your email.

How to use putty with ssh keys on Windows

5 Sep 2008

[ssh][1] is normally used nowadays instead of telnet for remotely accessing Linux servers (and other devices), as telnet is an insecure plain text protocol (and passwords can be easily captured using tools like [dsniff][2]).

svn over an ssh tunnel

5 Dec 2007

Often a subversion server is on an internal server that can’t be reached by a DMZ server, and ssh+svn isn’t setup. Here’s a quick recipe for ssh tunnelling from the subversion server to the DMZ server and using svn.

MySQL Logging and LogRotation

25 Oct 2007

dev.msql.com [logging documentation][1]

On Debian based systems, MySQL logging (and logrotation) is setup automatically so I’ve never had to worry about it. Unfortunately, I’m not using Debian at the moment.

MySQL Replication Notes

23 Oct 2007

dev.mysql.com [replication documentation][1]. Replication on MySQL is similar to Log Shipping on MS SQL; the default is statement level replication, but newer versions also offer row-based replication.

bang history

11 Sep 2007

There are three fields (separated by colons) that can be manipulated using the bang history command:

Mac OSX Startup

16 May 2007

Some notes on the startup sequence for Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger), and troubleshooting the startup process. These will be corrected/expanded as I learn more about the process.

ubuntu sources.list generator

28 Nov 2005

Site to generate an ubuntu sources.list for your preferred set of repositories. Just tick all repositories you want; the default set is selected automatically.