Linux

Every time I set up a new Linux machine for development, I frequently find myself always Googling the Bash shell modifications to make the shell prompt more Git friendly. Never again!

This guide is designed to provide a comprehensive deployment method for users who wish to set up a simple OneBusAway application with minimal configurations. It is primarily intended for use cases that would need to be more permanent than just using the quick start version of OneBusAway. Unlike quick start, this solution boots with the server automatically with no additional configuration required.

The built in commands in Linux are simply awesome. Trying to do any advanced partition maneuvers in Windows are difficult to do and often requires expensive third party software to simplify the process. This is untrue in Linux.

The dd command in Linux can be used to clone drives between drives or even produce image files of drives, all with a few simple commands from the command line.

Linode is an amazing platform. This platform recently just got better with the ability to boot your Linodes from Block Storage.

One shortcoming of Block Storage is that you can only resize it in one direction: up. This can prove to be particularly problematic when over-ambitious users first discover this feature and select too much storage than what they need or want. When they go to resize the Block Storage volume to decrease its size they quickly discover that, by default, Linode does not allow this.

Fortunately there is a workaround.

Ever wanted to watch the output of a Linux command the same way you would want to watch lines being added to a file?

Watch is a very simple Linux utility that allows you to effectively run the same command over and over in full screen, effectively giving you a live view of what you are looking at.

The tail Linux command is a very useful command for viewing logs. It is designed to show the end of a file on a screen. It can however be set to automatically set to always display the end of a file. Want to monitor your Debian web server's SSH logins? run this simple command:

tail -f /var/log/auth.log

In particular, I've found it very useful while attempting to troubleshoot problems with an exim4 mail server on a VestaCP installation by watching inbound and outbound email traffic.