Edit /etc/pam.d/su

Find, and uncomment the line that says

# session    required   pam_limits.so

Changes take effect on use, so you’ll have to re-su to get this to take effect.

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With that in mind, I pretty much always run fsck -y on a filesystem when it’s unwilling to mount due to an unclean mount (hard reboot/power failure/etc). This has always been done with ext3 or resierfs journaling file systems, and I’ve yet to notice any data loss, although the risk always exists.

As with any tip online, you proceed at your own risk.

So the standard procedure to recover a disk that won’t fsck on it’s own is simple, during it’s boot process it detects the drive was unmounted uncleanly (this is the default, and every ext2 or 3 drive is marked unclean when it is mounted, and only marked unclean when it is unmounted, the theory being that if it’s not unmounted then there is potentially lost or corrupt data.), and it starts running fsck on it. It will usually give you a progress indicator, and if fsck finds any problems it drops you to a shell, where you can manually repair the disk, with fsck -y /dev/XXX.

However, it seems, that often if the drive is a Linux software RAID partition, then it simply reboots, and trying to boot into single user mode, or with the drive in read only mode, all fail, and the system either loops a failing fsck, or reboots, or both, ad nausea m.

To the rescue is any Linux live CD. Lately, I prefer a Ubuntu install in live mode, but previously to that I really liked Knoppix. Boot it up, get to a command line, and follow these steps.

Overview is :

1. Boot up and get a root command line, (sudo su / su / single user mode)
2. Scan the RAID devices and build mdadm.conf file
3. Assemble each RAID device
4. fsck -y each RAID device
5. Reboot into normal / non-live CD mode
6. Success!

Most newer Linux store mdadm.conf in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, some will have it in /etc/mdadm.conf, and some simply won’t have it.

Use ls to find which one your live CD is using, and then make sure to redirect the output there. This will assume it’s /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Once booted, at the command prompt, as root, type (assuming you’re using either RAID-0 or RAID-1, and you have 3 partitions)

modprobe md
modprobe raid1
modprobe raid0
mdadm --examine --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
mdadm /dev/md2 --assemble
mdadm /dev/md1 --assemble
mdadm /dev/md0 --assemble
cat /proc/mdstat
#verify your RAID arrays are all disks complete (should show UU)
#now check each one
fsck -y /dev/md0
fsck -y /dev/md1
fsck -y /dev/md2
#now reboot and cross your fingers it all comes up good
reboot

Some notes:
If the disk isn’t heavily used, or you are using ext3 or resierfs, then you stand a decent chance of not losing any data with a fsck -y of the file system.

If the power was lost, or the machine locked up you may lose the last little bit of data, even on a journaled file system.

RAID-1 is awesome, and this can be done with a software RAID-1 even if one of the drives is failed. You can also just mount the disk without RAID, and operate as if it never was in an array.

You can do other maintenance on the drives, such as mount them (mount /dev/md2 /mnt/md2) and modify/copy/backup data/etc instead of, or in addition to, fsck’ing them.

I’ve had the best luck with ext3 and resierfs. I’ve read bad things about XFS, JFS, and other file systems.

I would love for Linux to support ZFS, as I’ve played with it on Open Solaris, and Sun’s VM of their storage appliance, and it seems nice.

Enjoy!

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If you ever fell for their ‘free trial’, check the card you used, it’s likely they are still charging you.

I opened a free trial account with freecreditreport.com in which I was told I would have 30 days to cancel.
I downloaded my free credit report, and promptly called them to cancel my account.
I was told the account was cancelled.
A month or so later I noticed I was charged by Truecredit at 800-493-3292
I called them and attempted to cancel again.
Finally after speaking and arguing with several people I was told the account was cancelled.
I have been charged monthly since then.

I’m not going to call them yet, this time I filed a dispute for every charge from them with American Express.

We’ll see how that goes. If it doesn’t go well, I will take them to small claims court.

Don’t ever go here, these guys are a bunch of dirty scammers!

I went to their website (linked above), and had a good laugh at the disclaimer at the top.

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The nice thing about this is your computer automatically handles which card to use, giving you the performance you need, and saving battery when it can.

In theory, this is great. In reality it’s a total joke, an EPIC FAIL on Apple’s part. You see, they switch based on which applications are running, guessing they need the graphics based on the libraries they load, it seems. This would be great if it was things like World of Warcraft or Photoshop, but Skype? Evernote? Give me a break!

You can go to power settings and disable automatic switching, however this sets it to ALWAYS use the Nvidia chipset, and gives you permanent short battery life.

In comes donation-ware graphics management tool gfxCardStatus written by Cody Kreiger.

1. Download the zip file
2. Unzip and move gfxCardStatus to Applications folder
3. Run gfxCardStatus, you will see an icon on your menu bar with either an ‘n’ or ‘i’ to indicate when you’re running in Nvidia or Intel graphics mode. Intel will give good battery life (5-6 hours for my core i5 15″), and Nvidia will give 1990′s battery life (3-4 hours on the same core i5 15″).
4. Click the icon, change to Intel only. Enjoy better battery life!
5. Set calendar appointment for 1-2 weeks in the future to go back to Cody’s site and donate a dollar or two for his work.

I plan to leave this on Intel only and see how both my battery life and performance is. I don’t play any games on my laptop, so I expect I won’t notice the difference.

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Howto delete all SMS messages on your jailbroken iPhone.

I frequently get hundreds to thousands of text messages that all say the same thing from my monitoring systems as part of my job. It’s *very* tedious to delete these one at a time, and paying my kids $1 per 100 to delete them is getting too expensive.

Yes, this must be a jailbroken iPhone. If you’re not jailbroken, upgrade to 3.1.3 and jailbreak using these instructions:

1. Sync your iPhone, let iTunes take a backup2. Upgrade your iPhone to 3.1.3 through iTunes
3. Once iPhone is 3.1.3 download and run Spirit Jailbreak (http://www.spiritjb.com/)
4. With iPhone connected, run Spirit and click Jailbreak
5. Wait for phone to reboot and you're done.
6. Go to Cydia, install Rock App

There is an app in Rock and Cydia that will delete all SMS but it SUCKS and routinely jacks up all your future SMS messages at random by inserting text and pictures into them. Fortunately, it seems the actual pictures and messages are not sent to the other party, but it does look on your iPhone like they were sent.

So I highly recommend NOT installing or using “Clear all SMS”.

Instead install “Terminal” from Rock or Cydia.

1. Launch Terminal
2. Case sensitive, type the below line and hit enter
rm ./Library/SMS/sms.db
3. It should just kick you to the next line, now reboot your iPhone

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This will return an md5sum which will look something like
9277826461d2cb19731f6201c6b2c6b3 -

Run it in 2 directories, if the sums of the sums match, the files are identical.
If not, you may want to rsync between them with something like
rsync-avz -e ssh localdir/ user@remotehost:/remotedir/
or
rsync-avz -e ssh user@remotehost:/remotedir/ localdir/

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They went to my hard drive->Library->Preferences and deleted the folder there called “SystemConfiguration”
Then rebooted, and viola, a working ethernet interface.

So, what must have happened to break mine, is when I restored my mac with time machine, it confused the network interfaces somewhere. The interface showed up, but always said ‘cable unplugged’. I had tried everything; deleting the interface in the network section of system preferences, configuring the interface with ifconfig in Terminal, creating multiple interfaces, rebooting, different cables, different networks, and different locations. The time machine had restored my network config folder and prevented OS X from correctly seeing the right interface.

The Mac genius said it can also help if you’re having problems staying connected to a wifi network.

Hope this helps!

Update 6/7/2010:

Here is a good article on troubleshooting your Mac OS X wireless networking at osxdaily.com

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As the user you want to set this up on, run the following commands.

(Note that I touch and then chmod og-rwx the .my.cnf file, since you’re putting your users mysql password in it, creating it and making it unreadable before editing is always a good idea.)

wget http://hackmysql.com/scripts/mysqlreport
chmod uog+x mysqlreport
mkdir bin logs
mv mysqlreport bin/
touch ~/.my.cnf
chmod og-rwx ~/.my.cnf
vi ~/.my.cnf

Now, put in a client section like this in, you can find your sock file with grep sock /etc/my.cnf, or grep sock /etc/mysql/my.cnf

[client]

user="root"

password="password"

socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Now, install perl’s DBD::MySQL

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo su

apt-get install libdbd-mysql-perl

via CPAN/Other Linux/Generic BSD:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

Optional, update CPAN:

install Bundle::CPAN

reload cpan

(If there are errors on following some dependencies exit, and restart your CPAN shell, then start with install Bundle::CPAN)
Install perl DBI

install DBD::mysql
exit

Now, run it to test, you should see a bunch of text output

~/bin/mysqlreport

Now, set it up to run from cron

crontab -e

Add a line like this (this will email to test@example.com a full report nightly at midnight, and put the last nights report in /home/USERNAME/logs/mysqlreport)

0 0 * * * /home/USERNAME/bin/mysqlreport --email test@example.com > /home/USERNAME/logs/mysqlreport.log 2>&1

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. Use Safari. Safari is nowhere near the browser Firefox is. But, we’re stuck with it on the iPad. But thats not all bad news. Many applications you’re used to using as custom apps on your iPhone actually will be better experienced in Safari on your iPad. This goes for news and blog readers the most so far. iPad specific versions will come out, and they may be superior to the web version. But, for now, many things we’ve come to rely on special apps for are just better directly in Safari.

. Embrace the cloud. I’m assuming you’ve already got email, and calendars online and setup on your iPad, but that’s only the beginning. Bring massive shared file access to your iPad with Dropbox. I use this on 3 computers to keep all my frequently uses files backed up, and in sync. And with their free app, I can access all of my files on my iPhone and iPad. Display of basic files, office documents works from within the app, including spreadsheet viewing. Use all of google’s tools, either their full versions, or their mobile versions at m.google.com.

. Buy apps! I know this sounds like more Apple propaganda, but you just dropped at least half a grand on this thing, why not spend a few more bucks to make it even better? I love flight controls updated ipad version. I’ve sprung for – Elements XD (Very cool, but $13, about $11 too much), Racing HD ($10, nice show off, but I’m not into racing games and can’t play it well), Air Video ($3, streams videos from desktop to iPad/iPhone), Artstudio ($3 easy painting). My main complaint here is it’s not obvious if you can get a refund for apps, so i try to read reviews a lot and search the web for info before buying. And why not load up on free apps? I’m using Google’s app, Siri search assistant, Heyway, AIM, and Skype. All carried over from my iPhone, and have added several iPad specific ones that I’m trying out – iBooks, abc player, netflix (streams video well to the iPad, this is HUGE), Associated Press, The Weather Channel Max, Google Earth, Allrecipies, AroundMe, Bloomberg, Adobe Ideas.

. Make bookmarks on your home screen in Safari. I’ve used this for brizzly.com, since their page from an iPad outshines their iPhone app. It’s just like having an app, with the added bonus that it takes me into my already active Safari session. This extends using the cloud to make web pages seem like apps.

. Keep a screen clowning cloth in your bag. This screen is BIG, and SHINY! It gets dirty and smudged ALL the time. A soft screen cleaning cloth handy does more than just keep my screen clean, it relieves the anxiety of letting people “see” my new toy, which is always done with their hands. Favorite thing cleaned off my screen so far was a very dry booger after my kids were playing on it for a few hours. (seriously, WTF? How did they miss that?). I also get my cloth damp before a serious clean.

. Make sure you have soft, shelf like places to set your iPad in places you frequent. For me this means a space on the desk, a spot on the counter in the kitchen, and one on a shelf in the closet, which seems to be my transient storage location.

. Practice. Typing, locating and using things like search, mail, calendar, and settings. Think for a moment what you use most, and spend a minute just practicing doing those things repeatedly. Saving a few seconds on a task you do a few thousand times really adds up, but, more importantly, it increases the usefulness of all the new tools on your iPad. I plan to practice touch typing, checking my calendar, searching my device, searching the net.

. Fix that ailing wifi coverage. If you have an iPad now, you only have wifi networking. I’m hopeful this is enough for me, but it does require I some attention to my wifi networks. I’m setting up another access point, maybe two, around the house, and will be tuning up the ones at work.

. Put your own movies on it. If you’re not already ripping your DVD collection, download handbrake and get started today. Rip in handbrake, import to your iPad via iTunes, or stream via Air Video. Video really shows off on this thing. Only downside is the audio quality stinks, and you really need headphones to watch a full movie. This is the future of kids car trip entertainment.

Well, that’s it for now, I hope it helps you have a better iPad experience.

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