Archive for category Sysadmin Kung Fu
Dual boot, the clean Debian way
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Debian, Sysadmin Kung Fu on May 22, 2009
Just a little trick I’ve found while installing Windows Vista on a Debian powered pc. If you want Grub2 to find and configure dual boot automagically, just install the package os-prober.
The update-grub command will now take care of your operating system pantheon for you.
A little VIM trick
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Sysadmin Kung Fu on March 2, 2009
This is a little useful trick for VIM users. As you may know VIM supports tabbed editing using the :tabnew command. It is then possible to switch between tabs using the :tabnext and :tabprev command. A faster shortcut is to add these two lines to the vimrc
nnoremap <F1> :tabprev
nnoremap <F2> :tabnext
Now you can use F1/F2 keys to switch between tabs.
Samba upgrade headache
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Sysadmin Kung Fu on February 11, 2009
Even a Debian machine when it’s not nursed by the loving hands of a system administrator for a long time could be a source of problems. I found myself upgrading samba from version 3.0.24 to 3.2.5 all at once, on our main fileserver. And suddenly all the windows machines here at school could not access the shares anymore. This problems seems not to be documented anywere. So I took a deep breath and start scrolling the huge samba changelog between the old and the new version. However I was lucky, the problematic change happened at version 3.0.25a. It seems that the default value of the msdsf root
option changed from true to false, but Windows cached this information. To solve the problem the solution is the usual: just reboot windows.