Linux

Turning off ipV6 in Ubuntu 16

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My home router doesn't handle IPv6, and for that matter, neither does my ISP, so I get a lot of IPv6 related garbage in my syslog and kern.log. To turn it off, you need to create a new file, rather than editing a system file, and then reload these settings. sudo nano /etc/sysctl.d/95-disable-ipv6.conf #add the … Read more

More Control Over Logwatch Report Dates

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I've been happily running Logwatch on several servers with the default 'yesterday' date range for several years. However I needed to run it for a client with a larger date range to check out a problem. But the options available for logwatch are only 'today', 'yesterday' and 'all'. Or so it told me. And even worse, the 'yesterday' option takes the date from the previous day, and pulls out all the info on that date. So if you run your logwatch report at 4pm, you're missing out on 16 hours worth of data! But it turns out logwatch is smarter than that …

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How to change the time anacron runs.

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Well this one took me a while to figure out, so I thought I'd blog about it in case I could save someone else some time. Anacron is installed on desktop / laptop orientated distributions as they're often switched off. It basically makes sure the daily, weekly and monthly cron jobs are run by checking … Read more

Ubuntu / Mint gvfsd-metadata kill script.

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I've always had trouble with gvfsd-metadata. Not that I know what it actually is, I just know that once or twice a day my computer will become unresponsive, and the culprit is this little program running around in the background, doing whatever it does, and pegging my CPU up to 100%. I've searched many forums. A lot of people are affected, but there doesn't really seem to be any solution, or any clear reasons why it happens.

So what I usually do is open up a Terminal, run top and see that gvfsd-metadata is at the top of the list redlining my CPU. From there, I press k to kill it (if its the topmost item, its PID will be automatically selected, otherwise enter the PID manually), and then retain the suggested kill signal value of 15. Not a terribly hard process, but as the CPU is maxed out, then opening a Terminal window and top can take a few minutes. Its that sluggish. So, like you do, I whipped up a quick script to handle this automatically, which I run every 5 minutes.

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