I recently tried to use pv in a bash script so that it wouldn’t interfere with my concept of communicating overall progress to the user. When I usually like to do is to echo -n a description of the current task and then later echo either “Done.” or “Failed!” (or something similar). Obviously, that somewhat [...]

While working on a bash script, I wanted to check if I could rm -rf a folder before actually attempting it and flushing the console with tons of write permission error messages. Upon failing to find what I wanted online, I constructed this beauty: find . \( -exec test -w {} \; -o \( -exec [...]

I often run Ubuntu server installations in VirtualBox. Sadly, this only provides you with the default console window. So most of the time I would additionally connect with Putty into the same VM, so that I can make use of a larger console. But recently it pissed me off so badly that I went hunting [...]

When I wanted to build the latest PHP for a server I found several guides online. Sadly none of them worked right away. So after finally getting it all to work like I wanted to, I decided to quickly write up this guide. I start with a clean Ubuntu 8.04 install. So, first things first: [...]

This is a little introduction to the latest version of my steam and hlds frontend bash script. I will demonstrate it’s use by setting up a new Team Fortress 2 game server with it. This tutorial assumes an Ubuntu 8.04.2 x86 server system. I set up a VM for the sake of this tutorial. It [...]

For a while now I have been running some dedicated servers for Source games. Primarily Team Fortress 2. I lately switched those off in favor of Left 4 Dead servers. I was always looking for a way to improve my setup. At some point during my initial googleing I came across this article. I based [...]

So in the process of migrating our company network architecture over the paths months, I had the chance to set up Cacti for server monitoring. I followed some documentation and articles on the net but ended up making some stupid mistakes. So, let’s start with this. The host system Cacti will be running on, is [...]