rm Argument list too long.. Linux Huh? moment.

By in Server Tags: , , ,

I recently had a little problem when deleting a store of spam e-mails off one of my personal servers.

Basically entering the standard death defying command of “rm -Rfv *” while in a directory (this will delete everything recursively – have fun), the system responded “Argument list too long” – cue the first “huh?” moment – I’ve used the command for years and years, never had a problem.

I did “man rm” to check I hadn’t had a “moment” and forgotten how to use it – nope.. . A little trawling came up with several people with the same problem but no really practical solutions.  The problem occurs when you have too many files for the built in systems used by the rm command in the kernel – these are pretty old so have some limits that you don’t expect! – you can do this:

rm -Rfv a* then rm -Rfv A* –  these deletes all files starting with a or A etc.. – very long and rather silly – so after thinking and thinking and muttering an old command came to mind 🙂  using a combination of find and xargs you can pipe a file on at a time so here we go – my favoured solution:

find . -name * | xargs rm -fv

This works fine – I suspect it will have a limit somewhere, but my server hasn’t hit it yet!

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-14

By in Tweets Tags:

  • RT @iknow_uk: Natural History #Museum, South Kensington, #London http://bit.ly/11QP1a and the original pre-ironed! http://is.gd/ZbG0 #
  • Daily Buzz:: london is having a tube train strike and the dutch exam failure is causing some sunny talks… isn't twitter weird! #
  • RT @iknow_uk: Picture of the day: Nymans Gardens, National Trust Mid Sussex http://bit.ly/wxeS5 and my take! http://tinyurl.com/lyclud #
  • Wants a new iphone! #
  • Wondering why things that are meant to be clever aren't #
  • What's happened to the weather ? Tornado looms over Bude, #Cornwall, as wild weather hits the Southwest http://bit.ly/xoX1y via @iknow_Uk #
  • Looking forward to the apprentice .. and making tea 😛 #

Natural History Museum Picture unfurled

By in Photo Mods Tags: , , ,

Iknow Uk seem to have found an ancient picture of the Natural History Museum in London.  Located at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iknow-uk/3600512285/in/set-72157619251872997/

The flickr account appears to have a revamped picture – however exclusively here is the original – before it got ironed flat!

Ancient scroll before being iron'd flat
Ancient scroll before being iron'd flat

A little play with some picture work :)

By in Photo Mods Tags: , ,

Saw this on iknow-uk’s flickr account today :  http://www.flickr.com/photos/iknow-uk/3573803284/in/set-72157618835887949/

Nymans Gardens
Nymans Gardens

And since it’s a nice picture I thought I would touch it up a little bit with a couple of programs – so after tweaking I applied a filter to make it look like a watercolour 🙂  And here it is 🙂  Nyman Gardens almost as if I painted it myself!

Nymans Gardens - iknow original modified
Nymans Gardens - iknow original modified

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-07

By in Tweets Tags:

  • getting annoyed at spammers trying to send spam via the company sites – go away you aren’t getting in stop annoying me! #
  • New Blog up for http://www.delicatedreams.co.uk – view it on . The start of more regular blogs! #
  • Wondering why ubuntu doesn’t like his 5 yr old laptop – I want to ditch windows on it! #
  • See our pictures, from preparing the #NationalBusinessAwards finalist presentation to the presentation, http://bit.ly/hmvah (via @iknow_uk) #

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Anti-Spam on servers…

By in Server Tags: , , ,

After several years of running different solutions on different servers I have found that ASSP is one of the best anti-spam solutions around.
However – after some time it still struggles and gets weaker, can anyone recommend any other systems that can work ALONGSIDE it (not replace).

Loss of title bar / close , minimise and maximise buttons in ubuntu

By in Computing Tags: , ,

A few weeks ago I upgraded ubuntu to Gutsy Gibbon – I was very impressed, the enhanced graphics which were not available to me in feisty now worked.

However somehow last week I lost my title bar, so no window title, no minimise or maximise button and the close button was gone. In addition the terminal window was now broken loading up a blank page.

After trawling through various forums and trying half a dozen fixes, with no success I finally tried turning off the special effects, and now have them back.

It’s a bit frustrating, I can only assume that one of the regular updates broke the driver that was working for me previously as no settings had been changed. Ah well – anyone with this problem, it’s really not worth the hassle just to have windows that wobble when moved and desktops that slide when changed 🙂

Cats continued

By in Household Tags: ,

Well after a few months – I thought I would update everyone about the Lion Poo story.

Basically applied it after getting annoyed at cats using the garden as a toilet, harem and anything else they wanted. At first we didn’t see much of a change, however by the time 3 days had past we still saw the same number of cats… except they didn’t stop – they just walked through, no more poo, no more fighting etc…

Just over a month afterwards – this was still the case, now around 2 months afterwards the cats are starting to come back – but all in all this Lion Poo stuff does work! Would have expected it to keep cats away in total – however just stopping them using our “facilities” is good enough for me!

Backup Backup Backup

By in Server Tags: , , ,

An incident earlier this week has made me review the backup systems in place for my wifes company (www.ihelm-enterprises.co.uk).

One of our clients doesn’t exclusively use us and so had a problem when another host lost a server and had no backups – the client also doesn’t backup frequently and had hoped that the server hosts would have some form of backup – but of course they didn’t.

We have always been a bit unusual in that we have routinely done backups – however we don’t do them every day and they do frequently fail – as we have a mixture of servers we had a rather un-orthodox way of doing them.

Server 1 performed its backup by transferring to Server2
Server 2 then transferred server 1 and server 2’s backup to the next server etc… until the final resting place was a repository where only the final server could get teh files – this was backed up by a 3rd party regularly.

However after hearing of our clients problems I thought I would try our system to see if we could easily recover – and found that
a) our repository was full and I hadn’t had any notification of this.
b) geting the files off was extremely difficult as some of the files are very large and the server will access to the repository didn’t have a lot of space…
c)  Some of the servers have not been notifying me of messages encountered during the backup so no idea of the files were complete or not.

So decided to re-think this a bit.

Now our servers transmit to our office computers – one of which is on 24hrs – this then uses windows file sharing (despite it being a linux computer 🙂 ) to copy the files over to a new NAS which is located somewhere the office.

We have already seen some benefits from this – we can easily see what files are on the NAS & restoring is simple, also each server has a set time to transfer its files – so any problems we only need to look at that server and re-run specific backups.

The bottom line is – if you do provide backups or just to backup your own work – do check your backup system every now and again – ours had been in place over a year after the previous model was un-doable with the adsl we had at the time – but since then the cheapness of Network Attached Storage devices has meant we can affordably implement this as well.

Backup – Backup – Backup – Check – Review – Backup – Backup – Backup – Check – Review, this is now my new mantra!

Big Cat vs Small Cat

By in Household Tags: ,

In our new house we have had a problem with cats – in the back garden to be precise.
Basically the previous owners didn’t care about the back & left it grow wild for around five years and all the local cats got very used to using the back garden as a litter tray.

After clearing the weeds it’s now a case of how to stop them from returning – we have plans for some smelling plants etc.. but they won’t be done until next year at the earliest – however we think the solution is in hand.

Basically you can now buy Lion Poo from various online stores – this is actually pellets with the scent/essence in them rather than the real stuff.  It was delivered today – going to wait to apply it until the weather gets a bit better and I am a bit more mobile.

Hopefully this will work – if so then maybe the next step is to buy a lion…  Has anyone else tried this successfully or is anyone remotely intrested in knowing if it worked? If so check back here in a month or so when I should have posted an update.

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