You ever hear of Splunk? Splunk enables you to search and navigate all your logs and IT data in real time; logs, configurations, messages, traps and alerts, scripts and metrics. It’s an awesome tool to make it easier to monitor and watch your log files. Unfortunately, Splunk is expensive. How expensive? Try $5000 a year, for the cheapest license. Here’s the main problem; the free version of Splunk does not come with any user authentication, not even Admin authentication. This means that anyone can access your Admin area of Splunk, and can see any log files you have and can even set up new Splunks (log file watches). Let’s fix this!
I would have thought that a standard feature of Splunk would be at least Admin user authentication, but you can only get that with the professional version of Splunk. You have 30 days of the Professional version of Splunk, and then you must purchase the license after that. So, most individuals that just want to manage their log files remotely via the web, cannot afford and should not even purchase a Professional license, so the Free version is perfect. The lack of authentication kind of makes you turn your nose to Splunk, as this posses a security issue. Note one thing, when I say authentication, I mean username and password. You literally can access all admin features, including license information, just by going to the web address (which is usually a domain name on the default port 8000, e.g. http://domain.com:8000). This is totally rediculous. We can get around this by running a proxy within Apache and secure the subdomain (http://splunk.example.com/) with a .htaccess file. Continue reading Splunk Free: .htaccess Protection using Apache
Ugh. Another Windows error. Another Windows error that really doesn’t tell you what is really wrong; some (most) people aren’t nerds. Don’t worry, I’ve got your fix right here. This has to do with memory on your Windows XP system. Have you tried Hibernating or putting your system into standby after upgrading your RAM? If you have, keep on reading. Continue reading Windows Fix: “Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API”
Awhile back when trying to add a directory to Apache on my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server, I ran into some issues. These issues, of course were the infamous 403 “Forbidden” error that your web barfs up when you try to access a server that is not publicly viewable, because of permission issues. I’m going to give you my scenario and explain how you can fix this issue, so that you don’t have to go through an hour of throwing your hands up in disgust. Continue reading Curing ‘Symbolic link not allowed’ (Apache 2.0)
Have you ever received the Failed to create named-pipe directory error message via the vmware-mui error log files, and not able to access the VMWare Management Interface? If so, here’s the fix. Continue reading VMWare: “Failed to create named-pipe directory” error
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.