My Blog

find . -name ‘*.*’ | xargs grep -l ’search term’

UPDATE
The gentlemen who replied below is correct in stating that the command below would be easier.

grep -ril 'search_term' *

Well I’ve been running debian sarge with the 2.4 kernel for a long time and things came to ahead when I was unable to install some pecl and pear packages for some neat stuff I’m doing in PHP. I have a tendency to make drastic decisions. In geekdom upgrading your server to not only a new linux version about the kernel as well in one night is considered drastic…I think. I have lots of important stuff on there too, client files, mysql databases, lots of web content in /var/www and not to mention the countless hours, weeks worth of hours I’ve spent fine tuning it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve known for a while that there is a way to set the default group ownership and rwx permissions of files in a directory, but I’ve been content with changing files permission levels on an as needed basis until today.

To set the default file permissions in a directory:
umask 775 /path/to/dir

To set the default group ownership:
chmod g+s /path/to/dir

Here is a good article on file permissions in linux: http://www.linuxforums.org/security/file_permissions.html

So I needed to setup automated backups poor man style. Since I’m most proficient in PHP I created several PHP scripts that tar, gzip, and ftp my important files to a remote server. I then automated this by adding each script as a cron job to be run every sunday early in the morning. Here’s the crontab syntax:

* * * * * command to be executed
- - - - -
| | | | |
| | | | ----- Day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday=0 or 7)
| | | ------- Month (1 - 12)
| | --------- Day of month (1 - 31)
| ----------- Hour (0 - 23)
------------- Minute (0 - 59)

To edit your cronjobs type crontab -e

Here is a mock example:

15 3 * * 7 /home/root/backupmymusic.php
15 4 * * 7 /home/root/backupmyimages.php

I needed to setup SSL to increase login security for various web apps I’m running on my server. Luckily I found a good tutorial here. Here’s the process in a nutshell:

Read the rest of this entry »

Log rotate recently rotated my logs a little to early so now webalizer is only displaying statistics for the last two days. After changing logrotat to run once a month instead of weekly I wanted to “repair” my apache log files. I always forget how to use the cat command so it became the perfect candidate for a quick article.

file1 – beginning text.
file2 – end text.

cat file1 file2 > newfile

You don’t have to create a new file. You can just append file1 to file2, but I chose this method just incase I messed something up. Here’s exactly what I did: cat access.log.1 access.log > test and once I verified the test file looked good I did a mv test access.log so now I have one giant log file. I then forced webalizer to run and everything looks good now. Since I’m on it, I actually had to copy access.log to access.log.1 to finally get webalizer to see everything I wanted. I forced webalizer to run by executing the /usr/bin/webalizer command on my debian system.

I often forget how to get the OS type and service type’s of remote servers. Here are a few commands that are quick, easy, and effective.

If curl is installed you can execute curl –head http://www.example.com to return web server and OS information. Note there are two dashes in front of head.

If nmap is installed nmap -p 80 -sV http://www.example.com will return the same information as above. The added benefit of using nmap is that you can change the port number parameter in front of -p to anything (25 for smtp, 21 for ftp, etc).