Digital Comic Reader
May 15, 2006 | 12 Comments
If you are reading digital comics in Windows, CDisplay is the right application for you.
If you are reading comics on a Mac, unfortunately there is not a CDisplay version for you. However, you can get FFView.
Comical is also a pretty nice application and is available for MacOS, Windows, or Linux. In one instance I even had a file Comical could read that CDisplay was showing improperly. However, I think overall Comical is slightly inferior to the other two applications.
On a slightly different topic, if the new Sony Reader that was shown at CES and highlighted on Gizmodo turns out to be as good as it appears, that may be another solution to investigate. The biggest disadvantage here that I can see though is it appears to only display in black and white.
Tags: "digital comics", cbr, cbz, cdisplay, comic books, comical, comics, ffview, linux, macos, sony, sony reader, windows
Password-less SSH Login
May 8, 2006 | 14 Comments
On occasion I have the need to establish trust relationships between Unix boxes so that I can script file transfers. In short, here’s how you leverage SSH to do that. Using the example of trying to connect from server ‘ender’ to get a file on ‘bean’ follow this example:
- Connect to ender
- type:
ssh-keygen -t rsa- default directory for keyfiles will be ~/.ssh/
- if you do not want to be prompted, leave passphrase blank
- copy the contents of .ssh/id_rsa.pub (there should only be one line)
- place this line on bean, in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
- that’s it, you should now be able to ssh/sftp/scp from ender to bean without being prompted for a password!
For further detail and a more complete example check this site out.
Update: You must have "RSAAuthentication yes" in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. On many Linux installations this setting is commented out in a default install
Tags: authentication, keygen, linux, pass phrase, password, scp, sftp, solaris, ssh, system administration, unix
Definition: Code Turd
April 7, 2006 | 22 Comments
In a major enterprise system we pay a lot of money for, a recent patch threw us an error based on the following line of code in a shell script:
echo "I am what is running, this is linux" >> /home/ban7/jobsub/for_whatever_purpose.txt
This line was not conditional and was ironically being run on a Solaris system, not Linux. Our DBA Jon Graton defines these little gems of “production” code as “code turds”.
Tags: code, dba, definition, disk turd, jon graton, linux, programming, shell script, solaris, unix
Showing More On Your Terminal
January 13, 2006 | 4 Comments
I have a monitor hooked to a FreedBSD system in my office that used to just show a login prompt all day long. Occassionally I’d sit at this machine and use the console, so the monitor was useful, but 99 out of 100 times I’d just SSH to the machine.
I decided to put this monitor to better use by continually outputting some log data to this screen. Specifically I’m outputting LDI synchronization events, which are XML. Initially I was pretty satisfied with this, except for one littel annoyance. XML is bulky, so I could only see one event on the screen at a time. I found that using scroll lock I could scroll back and see old events, but what I really wanted was either a smaller font or more lines.
Enter vidcontrol.
vidcontrol -i mode will show all the modes your display supports, but more importantly, vidcontrol 80x60 will change your terminal from the standard 80×25. In short, you’ll get more than double the number of lines.
More importantly, I won’t have to wade through the man pages next time I forget this command…
Thanks to Erich for the help on solving this one. He found some great docs on vidcontrol and vidfont, whihc I have since lost… However, here is the manpage on vidcontrol.
Tags: bsd, freebsd, ldi, linux, log, logging, monitor, monitoring, terminal, unix, vidcontrol, xml