Linux shell hacking cont’d
Free space on your system:
df
Copying files from one machine to another one:
scp sourcefile username@targetmachine:targetfile
More Linux shell hacking
Steve Litt has written a nice article: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/quickhacks.htm
Bugzilla trouble
Back from holidays, I discovered that our customer migrated our development server to a new hardware. Without telling anybody of the devlopment team! First thing I noticed was that Bugzilla didn't work any more: I just got error messages like this: data/versioncache did not return a true value at globals.pl line 628. Googling around returned this mailing list entry which recommends rerunning checksetup.pl. Running ./checksetup.pl in the installation directory (under /etc/var/www/bugzilla) did the trick: everything is fine again. On to the next problem!
Installing Tomcat
Here is a nice how-to on how to install Tomcat on Linux. Includes instructions on how to run Tomcat in the context of a special user and how to write shell scripts for (re)starting Tomcat.
More Linux commands that might come in handy
This series on Linux contains quite some useful tips and commands.
System integration
Had to do some system integration this week. It's not what I really like. System integration should better be called "taming wild pieces of bits and bytes". However, here are some Linux commands I needed that I will likely forget if I do not write them down:
- Log in to a remote system, specifying a user name:
ssh hostname -l username - Unpack a .tar.gz file:
tar xvfz filename.tar.gz - Restart sshd:
/etc/init.d/sshd restart - Restart Tomcat:
/etc/init.d/tomcat restart - Text based web browsers:
- w3m
- lynx
- find out which process is listening on which ports:
netstat -p - (really) kill a process:
kill -9 - find out the process id of a java process:
ps aux | grep java
Likewise, here are some Windows commands that might come in handy:
- Need to start a number of PuTTY sessions from one batch file? Use the start command:
start putty -load session_name
start putty -load another_session_name


