Bob Droog

A new beginning.

So we are almost starting a new year together. Couple days ago I moved back to Colorado to attend college. I will be starting January 20th. My flight from Amsterdam to the United States didn’t start very good. Before I even left Amsterdam I had already a 4 hour delay. Then finally when we got to Chicago I figured out that my flight was canceled to Colorado Springs. So I had to stay the night in Chicago. United Airlines gave me a hotel room though, in the Hilton Hotel. So that was nice. They also gave me a dinner voucher. So I could eat where ever I wanted to and spend 15 dollars.

So I left my luggage out there with the lady, and she said that it would get on the first flight the next morning. Which I were supposed to be on too. After I slept for a couple hours in the hotel, I went back to the lady’s desk and asked if my luggage was still good.. She checked and everything was alright, it was scheduled for the same flight I was on. I felt pretty good about it. So I got on the airplane. Oh did I mention I got a First Class seat? That was kind of nice. So after about 2,5 hours or so I finally arrived in Colorado Springs.. And guess what.. No luggage. So I had to claim it, I had to fill out some paper work and wait for Tim and Zach to pick me up. It was a long day. But I can’t really complain I guess, cause then later I heard there was happened some crazy stuff in other airplains like you can read HERE. I could have been on that one.. You never know.

But I’m here, and safe. So thats good. Now I pretty much have some time to get back on my feet. I have been looking for furniture for about 5 days now. It’s harder then I thought. Also I really need a laptop, because now I’m using Tim’s computer all the time.. thats not really a problem though. But it’s easier for myself to have a laptop again. So I can install my email client and all that.

Yesterday I went to visit my old host family, it was nice to see them again. We had fun. And I brought some presents. So everybody happy. haha.

So this is all what’s on my mind right now, when I have some new stuff I’ll post it! Thanks for reading!

Convert .flv to .wmv using bash.

Package needed: ffmpeg

Using the command shown underneath you can convert the movie extension .flv to .wmv real easily.

How to get yum package update notifications via e-mail?

This will work for: Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora
For Debian / Ubuntu: Please visit this website.

My server sends me a notifications for everything what happens on the server through e-mail, the only thing I had to check manually every time were the updates / upgrades for my Linux system. I figured there should be a way to get yum-update send notifications with available upgrades. So what we are going to do now is force yum to send an email when a update or upgrade is available.

First thing we need to do is open the yum config file.

Add these variables, and change “email_to” to your e-mail address:

Here is my working config file. You can also just copy and use this one and change the e-mail addresses.

After saving the file. Restart notification yum-updatesd service.

E-mail notification sample sent by yum notification.

Five ways to backup your Linux Computer or Server using bash.

Using “DD”

Make a backup of a local hard disk on remote host via ssh.

Backup content of the hard drive to a file.

Make a copy of MBR (Master Boot Record) to floppy.

Restore MBR from backup copy saved to floppy.

Using “Dump”

Make a full backup of directory ‘/home’.

Make a incremental backup of directory ‘/home’

Restoring a backup interactively.

Using “Rsync”

Synchronization between directories.

Rsync via SSH tunnel.

Synchronize a local directory with a remote directory via ssh and compression.

Synchronize a remote directory with a local directory via ssh and compression.

Using “tar”

Make a incremental backup of directory ‘/home/user’

For more or better ways to backup your system using tar look here.

Using “SSH”

Copy content of a directory on remote directory via ssh.

Copy a local directory on remote directory via ssh.

Local copy preserving permits and links from a directory to another.

Eight interesting Linux/Unix commands.

This command shows you information about who is logged in.

This gathers information about a domain name.

Query DNS servers for information about domain names

Ancient command to find out more information about DNS

Find the disk usage of a file or a directory.
(-sh = better readable | -ch = the same but larger output)

Disk freespace, pretty much self explaining but I use it with the -h switch to convert the bytes to megabytes or gigabytes

Find information about users.

Show who is logged on, and print: time of last system boot, dead processes, system login processes, active processes spawned by init, current runlevel, last system clock change.

How to add overlay .png image to video as logo using bash?

Using this command you can create/convert a video with your own chosen logo. Have fun.

How to update your twitter status in linux using bash?

Updating your twitter status using the bash SHell in Linux is easier then you may think, you can update your status using “curl“, curl is a tool to transfer data from or to a server. All you have to do is execute this command showed underneath. This will transfer the status data to the twitter site using the Twitter API.

But of course, you don’t want to be typing all that every time you want to update your twitter status. So I found this website which has a executable twitter bash script.

Replace the user and password with your twitter user id and password. Now save the text to a file called ‘twitter‘ and give the file execute permission. Put this file in any folder in your path. If you want to use this script everywhere on the server make sure it’s located in /usr/local/bin or ~/bin. If you are a user on the server, you may just create the file in your ~/user folder.

Now, how to use the script?

If you have created the twitter file in /usr/local/bin or ~/bin you may use this command anywhere you are in the server.

For best results, enclose the message within quotes. This will prevent problems when using wild card characters like ‘?’

And if have created the twitter file in your ~/user directory, make sure you are in the same folder as the file and then you may use this command.

Not working?

Did you make sure the file has executable rights?

How to unrar multiple .rar files using bash?

You might need the package: unrar

You can check your server using the following command if you have already installed it or not.

If nothing shows up, install the package unrar. If you are using a Linux OS which uses yum update you can use the following command to install it.

If that does not work for you, you can simply install it manually using the next commands.

When that is all done, we can start using unrar. If you want to unrar multiple .rar files at once, you may use this command.