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Only Amazon can make free sound more free :)

I am hoarder :).. Esp for free stuff. That’s one of the reason, I have the Amazon Android App Store on my phone. Amazon gives “away” a free app every day. Even though I don’t really use/need the app that Amazon gives away, I get it, just in case. It is free :), so why not?

The apps usually cost something if brought in the regular app store, but Amazon makes them available for free for a day. So yesterday, I was surprised to see a free app appear in the free app of the day section. What gives?

RESOLUTIONS : 2011 : May – September Update

After a long hiatus :).. here’s a quick update on my 2011 resolutions. In short.. NOT GOOD.. I haven’t made progress (in fact slid back) on any of the pending items.

  • Lose the gut
    • I have gained back nearly all the weight I lost.
    • I blame it mainly on my mother-in-law :).. She was visiting us for a couple of months and it is amazing what good home cooked food can do to you tummy :).
    • I passed the annual insurance discount health check (my cholesterol came down), but need to concentrate on losing the weight.
    • Here is the obligatory chart.. 
  • Increase traffic to Kudithipudi.Org
    • Again no progress.. haven’t written a lot and the traffic is plateauing as a result.
  • CISSP Certification
    • The books are serving as decorations for my bookshelves :).. Need I say more.

Thinks look pretty dark eh… Let’s see if we can turn them around. Anyone has ideas on how to stick to the plan?

Inspiration..

I love my “work” to the point that most people that know me think that I am a “workaholic” :). One of the reasons, I love my job is the ability to share my passion for technology. And I know that I am on the right path (despite the long hours), when I receive notes like this (from an ex team-mate)

Hi Vinay,

I hope you are doing great. I would like to take this opportunity to express my thankfulness to you, for introducing us the Modular approach in Perl Scripting during the tenure at TravelClick.

Without your support, I probably wouldn’t have gained confidence to develop script which runs more than 500 lines. Hence I wish to dedicate this script to you.

Btw I started writing a Technical Blog over a year “http://ashok-linux-tips.blogspot.com”. I request you to have a look.

I must admit that the idea of sharing technical solutions via Blog was mainly inspired after seeing your https://kudithipudi.org J

Once again, thanks for all the support extended to us.

Regards

Ashok

Nice job Ashok :).

HOW TO : Search ownership of files in Linux

Say you have a directory with a bunch of sub directories and files and you want to see if all the files are owned by a particular user, you can use the following set of commands

[code]ls DIRECTORY_PATH -l -R | awk {‘print $3’} | grep -v USER_NAME[/code]

The set of commands do the following

  • ls -l -R shows the list of files and directories
  • awk prints the name of the owner of the file (it is the third column)
  • grep shows only the lines where the owner name doesn’t match

And yeah.. this works in most variants of Linux :).

HOW TO : Apache and SELinux

Quick note for future reference..

If you ever run into errors like this

[code]
<pre>Starting httpd: Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
(13)Permission denied: httpd: could not open error log file /etc/httpd/logs/error_log.
Unable to open logs
[FAILED]
[/code]
And you are scratching your head why Apache is throwing these errors, even when the said directory and files exist. And you have the right permissions!! Check if you have SELinux running and being enforced.
On RHEL, you can check if SELinux is running by
[code]cat /selinux/enforce [/code]
The two values are 0 and 1. 0 means, SELinux is not being enforced and 1 means it is.
You can quickly disable SELinux temporarily by
[code]echo 0 >/selinux/enforce [/code]
If you want to disable it permanently (i.e. survive reboots), you have to edit the file /etc/selinux/config and change the SELINUX line from enabled to disabled.