Linux System Admins Blog

Here is a quick tip on how to remove a list of files. Let’s say you have the list of files inside a file called files_to_remove. Usually I would do something like this:
LIST=`cat files_to_remove`
and then
ls -al $LIST
just to check what is in the list and if it looks good.
And finally:
rm -vf $LIST

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If you are using a shared server, or just have a limited account on your company servers, you might not have access to your php configuration file php.ini (this is usually found under /etc/php.ini in rhel/centos and /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini in debian/ubuntu). Still, in many situations it might be needed to enable php errors in the browser [...]

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Many people use subversion over ssh for a simple and secure way to work on remotely hosted svn repositories. This is normally as simple as running:
svn co svn+ssh://user@server/repo .
If the remote ssh server is not running on the default ssh port (tcp 22) then this needs a little tweaking to get it working. Normally I [...]

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This article is meant to be a quick quide that will introduce the things needed to get you started with Amazon EC2. All this information can be found in the EC2 api docs, and this is not meant to be a replacement of the documentation, just trying to show the things needed in a clear [...]

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Anyone running centos/rhel x86_64 systems has probably noticed that redhat has a strange way to install a mix of i386 and x86_64 rpms on such a systems. This is how redhat is using the 64bit architecture in a mixed way to be able to support also i386 applications. This is completely different from how for [...]

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The ASA 5505 is the smallest (and cheapest) solution from the current Cisco hardware security appliances. Still, if we have the proper software license (like Security Plus for example) we can use the ASA5505 to setup rather complex solutions. This post will show how we can setup a pair of ASA5505 in failover configuration, solution [...]

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So a couple of weeks ago I touted the AdBard folks and their FLOSS oriented ad network system.  Today we received the following email from them.  What is worse, is that the ads have already stopped appearing on the site.  .
It looks like they will be teaming up with  Free Software Foundation.
Hello,
This email details your [...]

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This post will show how you can easily upgrade ASDM (Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager for ASA) to the latest version on a Cisco ASA5500 firewall using the command line interface. In order to do this you will need the latest asdm image (you will need a proper cisco cco user and contract to download [...]

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Linux systems traditionally keep the definition of their timezone in /etc/localtime. This is a binary file with the timezone info, and if we want to change it we need to find the appropriate timezone file from /usr/share/zoneinfo and copy it over the one from /etc or just link to it. Once you change it, you [...]

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While investigating some ftp transfers issues we realized that there was something wrong with the logs generated by vsftpd. The timestamps reported in the vsftpd log were wrong, and the fact that they were always 5 hours behind the actual time made us think this was caused by a timezone issue. The system running this [...]

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