Category: How-To
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How to set up SNMP monitoring (snmpd) on Ubuntu 12.04
This one caused a bit of hassle recently – a few online guides don’t seem to work with the current version of Ubuntu. We found that this works, at least in the ~10 or so servers we have tried so far: sudo apt-get install snmpd Back up your snmpd.conf file: sudo…
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Ubuntu: How to update PHP’s timezone
We came across this one recently when setting up a Zabbix server, where the installation would not proceed until the PHP timezone was set. This is quite straightforward – using your favourite editor edit: /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini Look for the Module Settings section or search for: date.timezone (in vi /date.timezone should get…
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How to remove/delete old or unused kernels in Ubuntu
If you have upgraded your kernel you will have found that Ubuntu keeps the older ones around, which can be handy if something breaks in the newer kernel and you have to boot from your old system. Over time, however, these can add up in terms of the amount of space consumed – at…
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Monitoring network usage on Ubuntu
If you want to see how much traffic is passing through your network port there’s a handy tool called vnstat which will tally the amount of data passing through. You can install it with: sudo apt-get install vnstat It will usually add the databases and network ports automatically like so: …
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Setting up one browser remotely, one locally
As a follow-up to the Firefox and Internet Explorer remote browsing articles we were asked whether you could set IE up for remote browsing and Firefox for local browsing. This certainly can be done – set up your tunnel in Internet Explorer then open up Firefox and go to: Tools -> Options ->…
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Using an SSH tunnel with Internet Explorer
As a follow-up to the previous article on how to browse the web via an SSH tunnel in Firefox we’ve been asked to show how to do the same with Internet Explorer. The Putty set-up remains the same; once that’s complete, open Internet Explorer (we are using IE 9) and go to Tools ->…
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Browsing the web through a SSH tunnel with Firefox and Putty (Windows)
If you have the ability to SSH into a remote machine you also have the ability to direct your web browser’s traffic through SSH to that machine. This can be quite handy for browsing the (remote) local network without opening a HTTP port on the firewall. First, install Putty and Firefox. Putty can…
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Windows 7 – Stopping a Wacom pen from right-clicking on a long press (aka press and hold)
This is a personal bugbear which I encounter every time I reinstall a W7 OS. The problem is that when you hold the pen down – like you might when you’re trying to highlight text – Windows has a default setting of assuming that you wish to right click, which interrupts the selection you…
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ZFS: Renaming a zpool
If you’ve imported a pool from another system and want to change the name or have just changed your mind, this is actually quite straightforward to do. Run the following (as root): zpool export [poolname] As an example, for a pool named tank which we wish to rename notankshere: zpool export tank Then run:…
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How to kill a process after a set period of time
Knowing how to limit how long a process will run for is quite useful, particularly when you have daily backup scripts and the like which may at times run more than 24 hours; having multiple processes attempting to synchronize the same files can waste time, bandwidth and CPU power needlessly. The command we will…