Symetrik Domino Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘Tricks’

Have you ever been working on a Terminal shell SSH session, get busy and then went back to the shell to issue some more commands or look at something only to find that the shell window has locked up.

This requires you to close the Terminal window, open a new one and then login to your remote session again.

In a previous post here, I showed you how to create a ~/.ssh/config file.

Simply add these two lines to your ~/.ssh/config file and any SSH connection that you have to a remove server should not lock up.

ServerAliveCountMax 3
ServerAliveInterval 10

If you are like me and you have to push the up arrow in your terminal window each time you need to remember exactly what the command is to access your Amazon EC2 server, here is a time saving SSH configuration trick for you.

example:

$ cd ~/.ec2
$ ssh -i davidskey.pem ubuntu@ec2-69-37-131-80.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

You can create a config file in your ~/.ssh directory to include your identity file for individual host names.
If your Amazon server has a public DNS entry which points to the long Amazon public DNS name, you can make this even easier.

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ ls -al (if you don't find a file called "config" you can create one using the following line)
$ touch config
$ nano config

Add these lines: (assuming that dev.davidsdomain.com is a CNAME DNS entry which points to ec2-69-37-131-80.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com.

Host dev.davidsdomain.com
IdentityFile ~/.ec2/davidskey.pem


Host ec2-69-37-131-80.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
IdentityFile ~/.ec2/davidskey.pem

Now you can SSH to both domain names using only the following. Also note that you do not have to change to the ~/.ec2/ directory to issue the SSH command anymore.

$ ssh ubuntu@dev.davidsdomain.com
$ ssh ubuntu@ec2-69-37-131-80.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

One final note, is that this would work on any host that you use a keyfile to access via SSH. This is of course, not limited to Amazon EC2 server access.

I had a need today to change the security of all .php files in a sub-directory, which contained dozens of sub-directories.

I figured out how to do it recursively with the find command. In the example below, I set all *.php files to chmod 755.
All other files with a file extension other than .php and directories were unaffected.

$ cd /mydirectory
$ find . -type f -name '*.php' -exec chmod 755 {} \;

A few days ago, I wrote a post about adding Google Tasks to the Firefox sidebar. I’ve been using this for a few weeks now and feel more productive.

I have a gmail account and use it to synch my non-work/personal CalDAV calendar between my iPhone, different macs at home, and can access my personal calendar on my PC at work with Lotus Notes.

I’m also now able to synch my personal to-do lists (or tasks you may not want in your corporate Domino mailbox for whatever reason) between my iPhone, PC at work, and Macs at home (both via Firefox sidebar bookmarks).

I tried setting this up on a new computer today and wasn’t able to drag the google tasks to my firefox bookmarks tool bar.

I kept getting the error message “Close this window to resume using Tasks in Gmail.”

I found this second post which shows the exact URL that you need to bookmark, and also highlights how to either set this up in Google Chrome, or set up your tasks in a desktop application.

I found this link on how to add gmail tasks to your firefox sidebar.

If you are using Gmail, google docs, google tasks, google calendar, or you use it just to synch between your devices and home computer I would highly recommend giving it a read.

Of course, you are all only using your Blackberry’s to get to your Lotus Domino mail file aren’t you…. (maybe not).