As the unix-savvy among you probably know, there is One True Way to tell the time: the number of seconds elapsed since midnight on January 1, 1970 +0000. It’s an extremely convenient way for computers to represent the time, since it’s just an integer that goes up. There’s no parsing to be done, and arithmetic [...]
Archive of posts filed under the tips category.
Linix Tip of the Day: SystemTap
The other day, one of my co-workers, Evan, presented an interesting problem to me. Every day, at some point, a file named ] gets created in his home directory. He assumes that it is being created by a script with a typo in it… somewhere. But how to find out? It’s a hard thing to [...]
*nix Tip of the Day: Waiting in Scripts
Scripting is what makes Unix-like operating systems great. Every *nix, be it Linux, BSD, OS X, AIX, Solaris, or whatever other random distribution you can come up with, comes with a capable shell (or three) and a good set of basic utilities. Where a Windows administrator has to either fall to the horror that is [...]
Dynamic DNS: Part Two
This post is a follow-up to Dynamic DNS When last I left you, we had basic updateable DNS running and could update it from OS X. I’ve been a bit busy since then, but thanks to some prodding from @Loredo, I got back in and started looking at. What follows is the exciting story of [...]
*nix Tip of the Day: Dynamic DNS
It’s nice to have DNS records for all of your computers. It’s a giant pain in the ass to remember IP addresses, especially if you’re on something like a cable connection, where the IP address is dynamic (but only changes every month or two). Now, you could go ahead and use DynDNS or No-IP or [...]
