dd is a great unix and linux utility with many purposes and uses.  It is simply low level I/O that can ge used to generate files, convert files, wipe disks, recover disks and then some.  We've used dd quite extensively in our other posts to get work done and to recover data or disk metadata. […]

Setting the Static IP on your Samsung Ace 2X S7560 has a very short solution:  can't be done from the GUI the device offers, OOTB.  The way to do this is to set a Static DHCP IP on the router.  Since we have DD-WRT on ours, the process is fairly straight forward though I had to part […]

To prevent hotlinking, which is direct linking to another site's content such as images, videos, documents without actually storing them on your own hosting account often happens on the web and is generally frowned upon.  To prevent this, we include the following in our .htaccess file to prevent image / media hotlinking.  This is because […]

In AIX Maintenance mode, /dev/random and /dev/urandom are not configured.  This can be done manually like this to help recover the functionality though it's not readily available to start with: # [[ -r /dev/random ]] && rm -rf /dev/random; # [[ -r /dev/urandom ]] && rm -rf /dev/urandom; # mknod /dev/random c 39 0; # […]

This is a short Screen for Unix and Linux: HowTo and Reference for everyday use.  This quick screen tutorial and reference guide aims to provide the most commonly used features of this very useful utility.  When working with multiple ssh terminals it's handy to save a session especially where typing passwords is required often or you […]

Depending on your provider, the Motorola Surfboard download and upload speeds are well documented on the technical specs for the Motorola Surfboard SB5101.  Don't forget to do a speedtest as well.  Some claims from ISP's come in that the modem is limited to 12-10Mbps Download and 500-512Kbps Upload speeds.  This doesn't necessarily corrolate with numbers […]

Your akismet stats will report caught spam over time.  However this can start to number in the thousands.  You can block wordpress spammers using .htaccess IP blocks.  This had a dramatic effect.  This post is an extension of WordPress: Dealing with Comment and User Registration Spam. where we describe how to identify spamming IP's to your […]

When you see this: [root@localhost eth1]# yum search udev Error: Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: fedora/19/i386. Please verify its path and try again [root@localhost eth1]# it likely means you have't got a network connection problem.  See this post for resolving. Cheers, TK

So once our upgrade to FC19 was done, we notice we haven't got a network connection anymore.  This is because we try to use yum and get a bunch of error messages.  Here's how to solve it on the new system through a debugging session into the issue.  

The error rpmlib(X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir) is needed by filesystem came about when trying to upgrade from FC16 ( Fedora Core 16 ) to Fedora Core 19 ( FC19 ).  There is a fundamental filesystem change that has been done impacting every rpm on the new Fedora Linux distribution.  More towards the error, it came about when trying to upgrade rpm […]