Cargo Cult Sytem Administrator

GullRaDriel

And some other types too.

Fun article to read here: https://blog.lastinfirstout.net/2009/11/cargo-cult-system-administration.html

One particularly right: “Asserting that [Technology O] or [Platform L] or [Methodology A] is inherently superior to all others and blindly applying it to all problems. When you make such claims, are you applying science or religion?”

“It’s easy to fall into cargo cult mode.
Just re-boot it, it’ll be fine.” – Michael Janke

Clean cache to reclaim memory without a reboot

GullRaDriel

Tip submitted by my friend J.K when we were in need of a way to recover reserved cache space without booting.


In root:

PageCache only:

sync ; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Dentries and inodes:

sync ; echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

PageCache, Dentries and inodes:
(not recommanded in production as it forces a full cache rebuilt. you may still need it):

sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

In case you need to do it in a sudo:

echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Syslog, rsyslogd: change output format to display log level and facilities

GullRaDriel

If ever you need to sort log messages by their log level yo may need to change the default output format of the syslog.
For rsyslog it’s located in /etc/rsyslogd.conf. Add these lines after the line “$ActionFileDefaultTemplate RSYSLOG_TraditionalFileFormat” :

$template precise,”%timegenerated% %HOSTNAME% {%syslogpriority%,%syslogfacility%} %syslogtag% %msg%\n”
$ActionFileDefaultTemplate precise

Then restart rsyslogd:
sudo service rsyslog restart

#rsyslogd #syslog #log #loglevel #facilities



X11 / xserver / XWIN gvim problems

GullRaDriel

Case:

WARNING**: Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.a11y.Bus was not provided by any .service files

Solved by adding NO_AT_BRIDGE=1 before launching gvim ( i.e [user@server]$ NO_AT_BRIDGE=1 gvim myfile.txt) source: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/16327

Case:

connect /tmp/.X11-unix/X0: Permission denied
E233: cannot open display
Press ENTER or type command to continue

Solved by using correct DISPLAY informations before connecting (DISPLAY=localhost:0.0) source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/220234

execve: no such file or directory

GullRaDriel

If one day when using execve you encounter the “no such file or directory” problem, and that the file you tried to launch is really existing and with the good rights, then the problem is coming from the shebang not pointing to a valid interpreter.

In example: #!/bin/ksh and ksh is not installed

#reminder #execve