damonparker.org

Debugging Wifi Connectivity and Routing

damonp — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:33:32 +0000

Sometimes wifi connectivity issues can be massaged a little by getting a little pushy with it… turn your internal airport card off. Leave it off for a minute then turn it back on and see if by forcing it to attempt to re-connect to your local network. Oftentimes this will clear up minor issues.

Check your routing tables:

netstat -nr

Get just the default route:

netstat -nr | grep default

In action:

[root@howie ~]$ netstat -nr | grep default
5:default 192.168.1.1 UGSc 11 5 en1

Cloudy Costa Rican Sunset

damonp — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:21:02 +0000

Looks like it’s going to rain tonight.

iPhone Goodreader and Email

damonp — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:19:30 +0000

Goodreader is simply the best PDF / document reader around for the iPad. It allows you to download documents in a dozen different ways and store them locally on your device. Another great feature is the ability to directly email these as attachments from inside Goodreader.

Unfortunately, said feature is limited somewhat by the limitations of the device. Trying to compose a message in the tiny popup box is a pain… especially when the box starts jumping around on every keypress as the tiny window tries to alternately flow the text and show the attachment.

Good thing there is a fix for any app using the iPhone/iPad built-in mail functionality. Simply type something in the text field to put something in the message body. I use a couple of returns or set the To: address. Then close the message. When the app asks if you would like to save the draft, hit Yes and the message along with attachment will be saved in your Mail Drafts folder. You can retrieve it there any time to finish writing your message and send the attachment.

If you fail to type something in the new message pop up, the mail app wont ask you if you want to save the draft. It will exit and trash your message.

Enable Sendmail for PHP mail() in OSX

damonp — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:05:41 +0000

Since this didn’t dawn on me for thirty minutes while I pursued other avenues…

In /etc/hostconfig add/edit a line like:

MAILSERVER=-YES-

Note to self: Look for more OSX server administration clients.

Apache Log Grepping

damonp — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:34:51 +0000

Nothing beats a full stats package, but with a little grepping and a logfile and we can figure out some quick statistics.

Get only hits coming from Google.com/search:

grep 'google.com/search' access_log | head -1

Extract only the referrer field:

grep 'google.com/search' access_log | head -1 | awk '{print $11}'

Get the search terms only:

grep 'google.com/search' access_log | \
head -1 | \
awk '{print $11}' | \
cut -d\? -f2 | cut -d\& -f1 | \
sed 's/+/ /g;s/%22/"/g;s/q=//'

Here’s a little script that puts it all together. It finds the unique search terms, cleans out the trash, sorts them and list the top twenty five in order of descending hit count.

#!/bin/sh
LOG="/var/logs/httpd/access_log"
grep 'google.com/search' $LOG | \
awk '{print $11}' | \
cut -d\? -f2 | cut -d\& -f1 | \
sed 's/+/ /g;s/%22/"/g;s/q=//' | \
sed 's/%[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]/ /g;s/"//g' | \
grep -v '=' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -25

To see them all remove the | head -25 statement at the end of the command.

Thanks to an article at Linux Journal for the examples.

Find setuid root Files

damonp — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:29:20 +0000

Find all setuid / setgid files owned by root:

find / -user root -type f $ -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 $ -exec ls -ld '{}' \;

Find all setuid / setgid files owned by any user:

find / -type f $ -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 $ -exec ls -ld '{}' \;

Debugging HTTP Headers with cURL

damonp — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:05:39 +0000

curl -I http://damonparker.org

More info on cURL

Back

damonp — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:54:05 +0000

After nearly two years with not much to say, I decided to pick up the blog again. It was a long and winding journey, this time in between. Maybe more on that later.

I should be updating the pages of the blog with current info about myself and my projects over the next few weeks.

As always, the shop is open for any sysadmin or development projects.

DNS, Lookupd and OS X

damonp — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:27:30 +0000

Pre-Leopard the command to force OS X to flush and reload it’s DNS cache was:

sudo lookupd -flushcache

In Leopard, lookupd no longer exists. Instead force a DNS cache refresh with:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

OSX Scrollbars Top and Bottom

damonp — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:00:16 +0000

In Terminal:

defaults write "Apple Global Domain" AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth