Category Archives: Linux / Unix

The NEC ND-3620A and cdrecord

October 24th, 2007

When most hope was lost, a firmware upgrade brought results. After resolving a character set problem with cdrecord through a downgrade, I received a “0x30 Qual 0x05 (cannot write medium – incompatible format) Fru 0x0” error and thought the problem was with the DVDs that I had just purchased. The DVD burner identified itself as […]

iostat: Report CPU and IO Statistics

October 14th, 2007

The Linux User’s Manual page states, “The iostat command is used for monitoring system input/output device loading by observing the time the devices are active in relation to their average transfer rates.” The page continues, “The iostat command generates reports that can be used to change system configuration to better blaance the input/output load between […]

Configuring the Mouse Scroll Wheel

May 10th, 2007

Having packed my stuff just in case the Griffith Park Fire of ’07 drew closer to home, an opportunitity was created to rearrange my workspace. Rearranging my computers has allowed me to connect a keyboard and mouse directly to one of my principle development machines. I have been interfacing with the machine through VNC up […]

Chrooting SSH/SFTP

March 12th, 2007

Brandon Hutchinson provides a concise howto for chrooting SSH. For recent distributions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (like CentOS), the following may also be needed in addition to Hutchinson’s Fedora Core procedures: $ cp /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /chrootedpath/lib/. $ chmod 666 /chrootedpath/dev/null $ chmod 666 /chrootedpath/dev/zero Running ldd on the sshd binary executable will display the executable’s […]

chkconfig: Updates and Queries Runlevel Information for System Services

November 21st, 2006

The 4th Berkeley Distribution manual page states, “chkconfig provides a simple command-line tool for maintaining the /etc/rc[0-6].d directory hierarchy by relieving system administrators of the task of directly manipulating the numerous symbolic links in those directories.”