Welcome to The Linux Page

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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

Enlarge a virtual hard drive used in your Linux virtual machine manager

I created a disk for my WinXP that I run on my virtual machine. This was my first Windows install and when creating the drive, the system used the wrong size. I did not notice until the whole installation was done. So... I got a hard drive of 8Gb which was not really large enough since installing all of those things for XP, including some updates, I got at a little over 5Gb of data.

Since I wanted to install many other things such as MinGW, it was quite tight!

I looked around and found a page on Ubuntu Forums that explained out to do the job: How to resize Hard Drive in Virtualbox. It's

Memory Chip — how to test their integrity

Today I wanted to test the memory on a remote server. I could not just reboot and run memtest86+ so instead I had to look for a different solution to testing most of the computer memory without having to reboot...

Test Memory Through Linux File Cache with On-Disk Temporary File

WARNING: This test asssumes that /tmp is NOT mounted with tmpfs. To verify use df /tmp. If it says tmpfs under the Filesystem column, then this test is likely to fail as written.

# Good, using a physical disk
% df /tmp
Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md6         4675752  9808   ...

Installing Hylafax

Installation of HylaFAX

Installing Hylafax on Ubuntu 10.04 (and also some things to do on Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04...).

As I'm installing Hylafax I'm writing the steps I'm taking in case I need to do it twice...

First, install the client and server on your server, and the client application on all other machines that needs access to the Hylafax server.

    sudo apt-get install hylafax-client hylafax-server

The server will be started automatically on installation. However, it won't be setup for your modem...

Modem Setup for HylaFAX to use

You want to add the modem ...

JavaScript and undefined variables

As I create website, I often deal with JavaScript code. At times, a variable doesn't make it for different reasons, for instance a part is missing and thus the variable generation doesn't happen. If then the script uses that undefined variable, then it generates an error. In some cases, it may not matter too much. However, when the variable that doesn't exist is hit, the JavaScript interpreter generates an exception and stops the execution of the script altogether (unless you capture the exceptions... Do you do that?!)

The solution is to test the variable and since I always have to search how

I just updated Linux to the newest version for Ubuntu 10.04 and got an error with the firewall...

 * Setting up the firewall iptables...
iptables-restore v1.4.4: Couldn't load match `igmp':/lib/xtables/libipt_igmp.so: ... 
                             ... cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The fact is that the iptables code is now using a set of .so files to handle each protocol and it is found in the /lib/xtables folder. And there is no libipt_igmp.so file in there... so you cannot change anything against such packets. That's it...

I tried to use 2 as the

I have different scripts that synchronize different hard drives for either backup or just synch-ing my development system with one of the production systems.

I got an error for a little while after I created a folder on a destination as I wanted to make sure that the source folder was being copied...

That generated an error as follow:

  rsync: delete_file: rmdir "<destination>" failed: Directory not empty (39)
  rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(977) [sender=2.6.9]

The fact is that the source file was a softlink and not a folder. So ...

Attack by Bots

Since the ZmEu attack, I've been watching my logs a little closer. I also found a page that I could not read (but Google could and was kind enough to provide a cached version.) That page listed many bots that are not nice bots. So? I decided to block some of them, especially those that use very bad URLs or load many pages too quickly.

The result is that I'm getting more and IP addresses in my firewall. Although they get removed in a schedule that I will not state here, I can tell you that each time I block tenth when not hundredth of useless hits (worst than that at times those could be

Deleting a database in Synergration

Synergration AccessBooksRT is a tool we use to get a copy of QuickBooks tables in an MS-Access database.

It works great for our purpose and transformed some super sluggish forms into lightning fast forms. We still use QODBC for some of the work (updates) but 99% now goes through the database generated by Synergration instead.

Problem

I wrote some MS-Access code that I want to execute once a day.

I created a form a while back and included an entry like this:

  '#size' => 10

in several text fields of the form. Especially useful when you add a suffix:

  '#field_suffix' => 'Something'

But that would not do anything... I looked at the output of the form and it looked 100% correct. In other words, the input tag had its size="10" properly set. So the next step was to find whether some CSS code would be in the way.

You bet! The node.css file includes the following:

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Test Memory Through Linux File Cache with On-Disk Temporary File

Installation of HylaFAX

Modem Setup for HylaFAX to use

Problem