Entries with the tag “linux”

This quick tip will help you issue a reboot command during your Ansible playbook if a reboot is required.

I use Vagrant for most of my server management. One thing I noticed is that my Vagrantfile can get pretty large - especially if I have multiple environments that share the same configuration.

While those familiar with the specifics of linux and bash are probably very familiar with the various login sequence files, this might help someone!

Using an Ansible configuration, I wanted to use postfix on ubuntu to send out mail. However, I couldn’t seem to figure out exactly how to get it to stop asking for input during the apt-get install postfix process. Turns out, you can use debconf to set the values that are necessary for the install.

PHPStorm has an option to install an icon for your Unity Dash on ubuntu - you can do this through the menu system. But, if you use this, it always opens to your last project. I have a number of projects running simultaneously, so this is no good. I could, of course, stop it from opening the last project, and just display the splash page menu. But I didn’t like that either. I wanted to be able to type in the lens search box what I wanted.

Most of the development I do that needs to be tested on android is on a local subnet. Generally, this is because I am running the servers in virtual machines that mimic the production environment. When I want to test these websites via the android emulator, it would be nice to be able to surf to them locally (without putting them in a public QA environment) - as well as have the ability to use Android Chrome’s USB Debugging.

Normally I have multiple vm’s running for various different projects - all of these are in VMWare Workstation instances I toggle between suspend and started. I decided to create a script and an Ubuntu launcher icon for toggling the vms back and forth.

When I installed Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04, I had the problem where the terminal would boot up until it said something about checking battery state, and then freeze. If I flipped to a different terminal, I could sudo launch lightdm - and then login on the first terminal. Obviously, this wasn’t my first choice in fixing this, though.

As most developers are lazy, I’m a huge fan of scripts. I’ve found myself lately having to add entries to iptables to block a single IP or a small subnet, so I made a quick script to make the job easier on myself.

The other day I ran into this problem where postfix insisted on delivering mail… as it was supposed to do! As it was configured! But this isn’t what I wanted. Let me explain what was happening:

Because the internet in the Crown building is as good as… well my parents 19.2K dialup - which drops pretty much every 5 minutes, I’ve had to use GNU screen extensively.