I’ve used UFS2 snapshots on FreeBSD by means of the dump command to make stateful filesystem backups in the past, so I recently wanted to take a similar approach to backup some Linux servers. Most GNU/Linux distributions use ext3 as their root filesystem by default these days which does not natively support snapshots, so I needed to find another way to do it. As it turns out, I used LVM on my main Linux servers to add a layer of virtualization to the storage subsystem. »
Having done Linux administration for over 10 years now, I use the watch command almost every day. On Linux, watch will run a command every couple seconds. It’s particularly nice for watching files change:
watch ls -lah This example will keep showing the output of ls -lah every 2 seconds.
About a year ago I switched a couple servers over to FreeBSD 6.1 because of its security features and more stable development model. »
I use Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Web Premium every day, Flash, Fireworks, Photoshop, but most of all Dreamweaver. I consider Dreamweaver CS3 to be the best HTML/CSS visual editor available and a it’s a very handy FTP client as well. It also serves as a nice text editor with syntax highlighting for PHP (although PDT for Eclipse is MUCH better). My problem is that it crashes on me almost every day with this really annoying error: Runtime Error! »
Although I use AMFPHP RemoteObjects with the Cairngorm Framework everyday, I never had a need for a simple LocalConnection. LocalConnections let you communicate between running SWFs, the only problem is that they are unidirectional. SWF A can make a new LocalConnection to SWF B and invoke it’s methods, but SWF B can’t contact SWF A. The way to get around this is to make another LocalConnection back from SWF B to SWF A. »
Quick Linux Tip:
If you’re trying to delete a very large number of files at one time (I deleted a directory with 485,000+ today), you will probably run into this error:
/bin/rm: Argument list too long. The problem is that when you type something like rm -rf *, the * is replaced with a list of every matching file, like rm -rf file1 file2 file3 file4 and so on. There is a relatively small buffer of memory allocated to storing this list of arguments and if it is filled up, the shell will not execute the program. »