Linuxgangster.org (??) has a good article up on the powerful grep command. GREP is one of the most useful command line tools in linux (really, there are so many it’s hard to choose, but this is one I use more frequently than most others…) grep can stand on it’s own to look for a term in many files (for example)
grep soughtafterterm *.txt
it will display which line numbers and which files it appears in.
Enterprise Linux has a good article on some handy aliases under linux that can make CLI usage much more handy. The only warning I would have is to be careful that an alias you want to create doesn’t conflict with another useful program. (One of the comments noted that ld is the executable of the linker).
Migrating Outlook Express data from one machine to another. Addresses are easy to export… file export Address Book gives a good option to CSV (comma seperated value) output. Which is a nice common denominator. (WAB/PAB output wouldn’t hurt.) But, File, Export, Messages only let’s you dump your Outlook Express messages into Exchange/Outlook. (!) Now, this is a pet peeve I’ve had for sometime with Outlook Express. There are just too many places to tell people to look for their data.
This article from enterprise.linux.com is the second on those essential linux command line utilities for system administrators. Covered this time around are netcat, tcpdump, ethereal, nmap, MultiTail, find Xargs, awk and sed, bash and cvs. I’ve never used MultiTail, but it sounds like it’s worth looking at. Nmap is virtually essential in network auditing. Sed is one of those utitilies that it seems you can do most anything with.
Database replication is one of those useful things that can really make your life simpler. It’s not really a way of backing up the data in a MySQL database, because if you inadvertently issue a command to delete the entire database, it won’t save you from yourself…. it will faithfully replicate the change to the slave servers. However, in the event of hardware failure or other abrupt disruption of connectivity, the concept of replicating from a master to a slave server is ideal.
How-to forge has what they describe as a copy and paste how-to up on the Perfect setup for Mandriva 2006 to meet the needs of ISP’s and hosters. It’s copy-paste because they suggest copying the commands and pasting them into the putty/xterm/console window on the machine that you’re setting up. It’s welcome to see this kind of “handholding” so people can see that it really is quite straightforward to get up and running with a linux server.
As a couple earlier posts showed having a log file of what happens when Microsoft Outlook checks mail can be essential to figuring out why something is not happening that should (or why something is happening that shouldn’t.) Anyway, to turn on logging.
This is part II, click here for part one of the saga…
Okay, so I revisit to install Microsoft Office 2003 SP2 and hope that solves it. Somewhere along this time, I had also found a suggestion of removing the entire mail PROFILE and creating a new one. *(The theory being that previous account information may still be in a profile in spite of the mail account being deleted.) Again two or three days go by and just when you thought it was fixed, duplicates AGAIN…. This time I had log information though, finally a second piece of log information to work with.
This will likely be a multi-part story because it turns out the solution was one of the more obscure things I think I’ve run into AND I thought it was worth “dumping” everything I found out in the process here for my own reference and anyone else wandering through. I have a customer that uses Microsoft Outlook 2003 and has selected to “leave messages on server”, then delete them when they’re deleted from the recycle bin. This normally works well, although I do recall one (or two) instances in the past when he got duplicates.
Linux.com is running an article on easy automated backups with a new program called sbackup. Sbackup is a product of Google’s summer of code and is a GUI to pick and choose what to backup and when to routinely back it up. Apparently the project was also sponsored by Ubuntu. (I’d expect integration into their distro’s admin tools if not already then.)