Today's mostly trivial and "well-known except if you haven't seen it before" system administration tip is prompted by one of the recent comments over at James' blog.

Be careful when using shell wildcard patterns as arguments to scripts. There are two ways to mess up and you'll usually forget to test both of them.

(Read more...)

Topics: software/linux, technology/sysadmin

[#]

Melbourne airport's Qantas Club has free wifi, which is nice. However, all is not entirely sane in the network land:

...
Feb  1 18:24:36 lancre dhclient: bound to W.X.Y.Z -- renewal in 59 seconds.
...
Feb  1 18:25:35 lancre dhclient: bound to W.X.Y.Z -- renewal in 55 seconds.
...

and so on (public IP address changed to protect the innocent). Rinse, wash, repeat. I'm all for not tying up the network with unexpired leases that aren't being used, but 60 seconds seems a little eager. I'm just saying.

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au, technology/sysadmin

[#]

After having a reasonably productive morning, I decided to do some random sysadmin tasks for my home setup that have been sitting on the list for ages.

What follows is some rambling from spending a couple of hours happily wrapped up in "new software" land. Mostly (only?) of interest to Linux users.

(Read more...)

Topics: software/graphics, photography, technology/sysadmin

[#]