Thank you for making the “future” a reality..
Technology
Coolness factor..
You know, you are working at a cool company, when one of your favorite podcast mentions it in the show :). Check out the September 19th episode of Tech News Today and Tom speaks about how Gogo is going to improve the speed of in-flight Internet access by 4 times.
BTW.. if you want to work at a company that is changing the industry (of in-flight access and entertainment).. we are hiring :).
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 : Find the clients connecting to a NFS server
Quick tip to find out the clients connecting to a NFS server.
- Check the ports that NFS uses
[code] grep -i nfs /etc/services [/code]
- Check the clients connecting to the server using the port from above
[code] netstat -an | grep 2049 [/code]
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 :).
Unimaginative Error Pages : HP.com
One of the largest tech company in the world
Supposedly earns billions in consulting services
and what happens when thousands (and let’s imagine millions) hit their web app store?

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.
Overheard : Random comments about technology
Here are some interesting titbits from a executive summary event hosted by Redhat/Intel that I attended yesterday.
We decreased the execution times for our orders from 1.5 seconds to 5 milliseconds
This from an executive managing the technology organization for a large trading company. Imagine the geekiness in accomplishing this :).
For every 450 smartphones that get activated a server is added to support them
This from an Intel executive. So if there are 500000 android phones being activated every day.. that’s around 1111 servers being added just to serve the android fans :).
1 in 4 servers currently runs Linux
This from a Redhat executive. If anyone doubts that Linux is mainstream.. they are living under a rock 🙂
HOW TO : Use grep to search for credit card numbers
I was looking for a quick way to search for credit card numbers in a file and ran across this excellent post by Adrian Rollett. I tweaked his suggestion a bit to show some additional data.
Original suggestion
[code] grep ‘\(^\|[^0-9]\)\{1\}\([345]\{1\}[0-9]\{3\}\|6011\)\{1\}[-]\?[0-9]\{4\}[-]\?\[0-9]\{2\}[-]\?[0-9]\{2\}-\?[0-9]\{1,4\}\($\|[^0-9]\)\{1\}’ FILE_TO_SEARCH [/code]
My modification
[code] grep ‘\([345]\{1\}[0-9]\{3\}\|6011\)\{1\}[ -]\?[0-9]\{4\}[ -]\?[0-9]\{2\}[-]\?[0-9]\{2\}[ -]\?[0-9]\{1,4\}’ –color -H -n FILE_TO_SEARCH [/code]
The modified command will show the name of the file the number was found and at which line. You can tweak it further using additional options for grep. A good reference guide can be found here.
HOW TO : Export and import certificates using keytool
Keytool is a java utility to manage SSL key databases (stores). Here are a couple of options for using this tool
- List the certificates in the keystore
[code]keytool -list -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE [/code]
- Export a particular certificate from the keystore
[code]keytool -export -alias ALIAS_NAME_OF_CERT -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE [/code]
- Import a certificate into the keystore
[code]keytool -import -alias ALIAS_NAME_YOU_WANT -keystore NAME_OF_KEYSTORE_FILE -file NAME_OF_CERT_FILE_TO_IMPORT [/code]
