Archive for category Sysadmin Kung Fu

Dual boot, the clean Debian way

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.

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A little VIM trick

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.

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Samba upgrade headache

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.

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