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Power Mutt usage.

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I always install mutt when I'm setting up a server, mainly because I use it to send myself files from the command line, for local examination or archiving. Its quicker than using scp, ssh, or (heaven forbid) ftp. Plus you can use it in shell scripts. For example; But recently I was troubleshooting a server … Read more

Replacing a keyboard on a Lenovo G460

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Keyboards these days seem to be cheaply manufactured, and break easily. I've seen several friends' computers break in the last year, and a broken keyboard means the entire thing is unusable. If its under warranty, great, but if not, then you might end up having to replace it yourself. I couldn't find this information online, so I thought I'd post it here. Guide with pictures, after the break …

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Dos Boot Disks Under Linux

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Sometimes you have no choice and you need to boot into a DOS boot disk — to upgrade your BIOS for example, or to run Seagate's SeaTools, as I had to recently. This can be a headache when you're using Linux. I was having issues with the SeaTools' own boot disk, as I wanted to … Read more

Viewing heavily commented config files

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Just a quick one, as I haven't posted for a while. This is a cool trick for getting the juice out of heavily commented files. In particular I used this on /etc/samba/smb.conf, but also good for apache2.conf, php.ini etc. The magic is this. grep -v -e "^#" -e "^;" -e "^$" /etc/samba/smb.conf Basically, ignore all … Read more

Joomla and mysterious memory usage

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I've been running a server which has a fairly busy Joomla site on it. The server has 2Gb RAM, and is running nginx, php5-fpm and mysql, and not much else. However it would run for a while and then the disk would start swapping out. Not a lot, but enough to cause a few issues. If I restarted the server, memory usage would start at something like this

>$ free
 total       used       free
 Mem:       2048036    1024048     1023988
 Swap:      4192960          0    4192960

After about a day it would look like this

>$ free
             total       used       free    
Mem:       2048036    1924048      73988   
Swap:      4192960          0    4192960

And eventually it would have a flurry of activity which would make it look like this

>$ free
             total       used       free    
Mem:       2048036    1924048      23988   
Swap:      4192960       4567     4188393

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