Update: An anonymous commenter pointed out that bash has the ability to do this in a much shorter way:

BLAH=${BLAH:-no}

Job done!, my original older way is below…

[root@sn-b02 init.d]# echo $BLAH

[root@sn-b02 init.d]# [ "${BLAH}" = "" ] && export BLAH="no"
[root@sn-b02 init.d]# echo $BLAH
no
[root@sn-b02 init.d]#

When running a command in bash it will store the return code in the special variable $?, like this:

[robin@book robin]$ ls -ld tmp
drwxr-xr-x  3 robin  robin  1024 Aug  3 11:02 tmp
[robin@book robin]$ echo $?
0
[robin@book robin]$ ls -ld bob
ls: bob: No such file or directory
[robin@book robin]$ echo $?
1
[robin@book robin]$

When running a series of commands in a pipe however it is sometimes necerssary to find the return code of an individual command in the pipe, in this case bash stores the return codes in an array names $PIPESTATUS which you can access like any other bash array. The array can only be used once however, so if you want to use it more than once store it in some other temporary array.

[robin@book robin]$ echo "tmp"  | xargs ls -ld
drwxr-xr-x  3 robin  robin  1024 Aug  3 11:02 tmp
[robin@book robin]$ echo ${PIPESTATUS[@]}
0 0
[robin@book robin]$ echo "bob"  | xargs ls -ld
ls: bob: No such file or directory
[robin@book robin]$ echo ${PIPESTATUS[@]}
0 1
[robin@book robin]$ echo "bob"  | xargs ls -ld
ls: bob: No such file or directory
[robin@book robin]$ echo ${PIPESTATUS[1]}
1
[robin@book robin]$

I recently bought one of these fantastic Lacie drives. The problem is that iDVD will not let me write to anything other than a superdrive. Then I found this thread. Download the file from there (mirrored here (Broken link http://usefulthings.org.uk/files/HPfurz.sit)) extract the archive and place the 2 files in your home account. Control click on either the burn dvd button or the burn dvd menu item and it should present you with a list of dvd writers attached to the machine, or the option of writing to a img file.

I’m using os X (10.3.3) to serve images via apache here and have just been bitten by the lack of case sensitivity on the filesystem. I had a LocationMatch block in httpd.conf which was not as secure as I expected:

<LocationMatch "/.*/hires/.*">
<Limit GET>
Satisfy any
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from XX.XX.XX.XX
</Limit>
</LocationMatch>

This was obviously meant to stop access to a hires directory, however because of the lack of case sensitivity if you tried to grab the same url but with HIRES instead it would fail to match this regex but it would still match the hires directory. To fix this I have changed the regex to:

<LocationMatch "/.*/(H|h)(I|i)(R|r)(E|e)(S|s)/.*">
<Limit GET>
Satisfy any
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from XX.XX.XX.XX
</Limit>
</LocationMatch>

If you have an apostrophe in XP’s Computer Description field then the computer will not be recognised as part of the samba domain despite it having joined properly.

This is in samba 3.0.2a untested in more recent versions as yet.

My friend recently got an ATA133 card with this chipset on it. The full proc/pci entry looks like:

RAID bus controller: PCI device 1283:8212 (Integrated Technology Express, Inc.) (rev 17).
      IRQ 10.
      Master Capable.  No bursts.  Min Gnt=8.Max Lat=8.
      I/O at 0xdcd8 [0xdcdf].
      I/O at 0xdcd0 [0xdcd3].
      I/O at 0xdcc0 [0xdcc7].
      I/O at 0xdcb8 [0xdcbb].
      I/O at 0xdca0 [0xdcaf].

If you want to use this under linux you need to compile in the driver as detailed under the title **IT8212F

ATA133 RAID Controller** on this page (Broken link ~~http://www.ite.com.tw/software_download/software_download2.asp~~). To compile up the driver you need to enable scsi in your kernel and link /usr/src/linux-2.4 (or linux-2.6 depending on kernel version) to wherever your linux source tree is. If you are using modules remember to modprobe both scsi and sd_mod.

You then put the created iteraid.o file into

/lib/modules/<i>kernel-version</i>/kernel/drivers/ide/pci/

making directories if you have to.

while trying to fix lookupd hanging I found this (Broken link http://www.macwrite.com/criticalmass/ten-more-mac-os-x-loose-ends-part-2-pf.php) little page which explains some stuff about how to change the order etc.

Some perl that sets a timeout value

#!/usr/bin/perl

$SIG{ALRM} = sub { alarmed(); };

alarm(20);
eval { check_whatever; };
alarm(0);

sub check_whatever()
{
  # stuff to do that might timeout
  exit 0;
}

sub alarmed()
{
  # stuff to do after the alarm has gone off.
  exit 1;
}

Thanks to Timbo for help with this…

CA.pl -newca and follow prompts

CA.pl -signreq (req from WS/AS needs to be call newreq.pem)

output is newcert.pem, this goes back to WS/AS

needs gcc libs to work

Found this nice page with scripts and configs for parsing the apache server-status page and using mrtg to graph them