A few friends of mine stare at me blankly when I mention Samba and SMB. In fact, sometimes they think it’s the same thing, when in fact, it’s not. I’ll talk about the differences between the two and walk you through setting up Samba networked shares. This will give you a nice introduction to Samba and also Linux, if you are not familiar with that, also.
The real question here isn’t why SMB, or why Samba for that matter? Well, first off, after I explain to you what SMB is and then explain what Samba is, you’ll see that this question I just asked was mildly stupid. The actual question here is “Why create network shares in the first place?”. This is a very basic, honest question, but it tends to turn a few heads. I’ll give you a scenario. You have 5 computers in the house; your laptop, your desktop, the kids have two computers, and your wife has her school laptop. So, your wife has school work and her latest favorite songs on her laptop, the kids have theirs, and you have all your applications and whatnot all on your laptop and desktop. What might seem like not that much data, turns into gigs of data. You have tons of music, school reports and research, ISOs and applications, Development related stuff, pictures from the past four years. You notice you are running out of space on your kid’s computers and you wife’s laptop is running a little sluggish. Now, this is probably highly due to the games and occasional pop ups that are clicked, but hey, why take up space on the systems, when everything can be centralized? Yes, that’s the word - Centralized. Continue reading Stepping Into Samba
Currently, I work as a Datacenter Technician at The Planet. I had a customer ask me how to, one time, delete all the mail in his /home/[account-name]/mail/cur directory.
So, first off, I wanted him to just take a look at that directory, get to know it (figuratively speaking). So I had him run the du command on it; wow, you wouldn’t imaging how much mail was in there!
The actual command I had him run was:
BASH
cd /home/[account-name]/mail/cur
du -h ./
The output was 1.3GB. Yes, that’s right, he had 1.3GB of mail files. Some people are unaware of what exactly the difference is between the /new directory and the /cur. The difference is simply that the /cur directory is full of email messages that the user has already viewed somehow, whether by webmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc, they have viewed it, and the mail is now officially not exactly new. The /new directory is a directory that has mail that has not yet been opened by the user yet.
So, the customer asked me a simple question, “How do I go about just deleting this data?”. From a user’s point of view, the command would be:
BASH
cd /home/[account-name]/mail/cur
rm -r ./*
Then the customer would have received the error: /bin/rm: Argument list too long. I have found a workaround though. I have asked a few people around what they use the find command for. All of there answers where pretty much the same, “They help you find files”. That’s all they could really tell me what find does. This isn’t all true. find can help us defeat the /bin/rm: Argument list too long error. So, I had the customer run the following:
BASH
cd /home/[account-name]/mail/cur
find . -name '11*' -exec rm "{}" \;
It worked for him, and it can work for you. Let me dissect this command real quick for you, so that you aren’t completely lost. find is the actual command, followed by a period; this means you are going to be searching the current directory (at this time /home/[account-name]/mail/cur). Next you supply the -name switch to tell the find command that you want the pattern (coming next) to match the name of the file. You then give it a search pattern, and in this case all his files started with eleven (11) and everything after that was different, so the pattern would be 11*; make sure the search pattern is in single quotes. Next you supply the -exec command, which will execute any Linux command you want (as long as it is installed on your system). In this case we used the rm command. The quoted curly braces tell it to run rm on each file that matches the pattern supplied. That’s it. Simple command turns to be a very helpful utility.
Hope this helps someone in the future, as I had to figure it out on my own.
Vongo is Starz’ approach to a “movies-on-demand” type of service. I currently use it and I love it. The only thing I think would make it better is, well, the obvious - more movies! Overall, I really like Vongo and I’ll tell you why. First off, it allows you to download and watch movies at the same time; this is amazing due to the fact that a 1.3GB movie can take quite awhile to download, even on a high-speed internet connection. Another thing I just love about Vongo is that it is on-demand and only costs $9.95 a month; this is a deal if you watch movies a lot. I’m not much of a T.V. person, but I do love watching movies. As there are many other cool things about Vongo, there is one thing that I though would come built into the settings, but isn’t; where to store your movie files. Let’s find out how to fix this small, but annoying problem. Continue reading Changing Vongo’s default directory for storing movies
Have you ever wanted to let someone download a file or image from your website, but didn’t want to have the whole world know about, such as Google’s great search engine spiders? The robot.txt file only goes so far, personally I’d rather password protect my directories if I don’t want them crawled. It’s a great way to set up realms that only the privileged few know about. I’ll walk you through the very simple steps of doing so, and showing you what gets added on the server side. Continue reading How-To: Password Protect Apache Directories with .htaccess
CHMOD (chmod) is a UNIX oriented command that means “Changing Mode”, that let’s you change the mode (hence the name) of the file, or directory(s) depending on how the chmod command is used. When I say “changing mode”, I mean giving the file a different permission scheme, respectively read, write, and execute. This command, by the way, is one of the most useful and most used commands in Linux (among many others). Continue reading Understanding CHMOD and Creating permissions without a calculator
WOW! What a crazy 6 weeks I had! Three weeks of Human Relations and the other three weeks of Project Management. So, all this means is I know how to deal with you and create a successful project, so what? The main thing is, I really actually learned that everyone is different, and even though you may think you are one of those people that everyone get’s along with, think again. Continue reading Human Relations/Proj Mgmt. Recap