We all know that feeling when our disk fills up and you are left desperately scrabbling around to find out where your disk space has gone. In a previous blog post I discussed the use of the wonderful Konqueror File Size View, but this is no good for remote servers. Normally I would resort to “du” or the wonderful “find” utility to look for large files, but here is an interesting alternative that I had not come across before: ncdu (ncurses disk usage).
The more that I work from the command line, the more of a nuisance I find it that all my passwords are in KeePassX - an excellent GUI application.
For some time I have intended moving to pwsafe, but am put off by the
time it will take to migrate the data. An alternative is to export the
KeePassX data into an encrypted text file and use the gnupg.vim Vim
plugin to read and edit it. This post describes how to accomplish this
in a very few steps.
I finally decided to upgrade my work desktop to Debian Squeeze:
I manually removed all but the official lenny repositories (and removed the Debian Volatile repository which is no longer used), and updated them to “squeeze”:
I want to be able to support my father’s PC remotely via SSH and VNC. Some people recommend teamviewer, but I prefer the flexibility and security of ssh, and the fact that this approach is fully open source.
I have to be careful about the bandwidth I use at work; so I limit the bandwidth of apt-get and wget.
For apt-get you just need to create a new file:
I think there must be something wrong with me. Why, in this age of graphical user interfaces, does it delight me so much that I can view textual PDFs within Mutt (on a remote server without a gui)?
To set this up, you need to install pdftotext. This application is available in either poppler-utils or xpdf-utils - most people seem to use the latter, but I suspect the former is probably a better option for a text-only server. I installed poppler-utils.
I have been using Mutt for some time, but have always found it a pain for handling spam, so I finally spent the time yesterday to work out how to do it. The surprising thing is that there seemed to be different and confusing advice on how to achieve this. The best information turned out to be the Mutt manual itself, which is a great example of how open source documentation should be.
I confess, I like XKCD. Even though some of them are unfunny and others beyond my understanding, sometimes, just sometimes, they strike a chord.
My brother-in-law’s Buffalo HS-DH500GL NAS (network attached storage) has failed, it responds to pings, but cannot be accessed via the web interface, nor by the Windows client software. We reset the device on multiple occasions, but the reset failed to change the IP address to the default. We noticed that the rear fan is not working, which suggests that the device is not in the best of health.
I sometimes find myself wondering what a package’s dependencies are.
This question is usually quickly satisfied with a
$ sudo apt-get install packagename and then aborting, or perhaps more
elegantly $ sudo apt-get -s install packagename to simulate the
installation.
