The problem with Linux

Over at ZDNet Australia, Steven Deare asks a very pertinent question about why the decision by Kennards Hire to switch from Windows to Linux on all of it’s desktops has sadly remained inconspicuous:

Why has the country’s biggest known desktop Linux implementation gone relatively unpublicised for so long? This week I wrote about Kennards Hire’s project to migrate its whole IT infrastructure to Linux. The project should be a milestone reference point for vendors like Novell and Sun who keep telling us Linux is ready for the desktop, despite a dearth of local customers.

You’d think that this was indeed a golden opportunity for the major vendors to prove that Linux is ready for the desktop in a business environment.

Based on our experience, the only problem with Linux is the perception that it’s not as “good” as Windows. And the only way to change that is through more effective marketing and self-promotion.

Deleting files with bad names in Linux

In an earlier post I talked about the usefulness of the Linux "find" command to delete old files. Another, perhaps less common, use is to delete files with “bad characters” in the name. For instance, the famous "tar" archiver allows you to exclude certain files by specifying the "--exclude=filename" option.

This works nicely unless you happen to misspell the word “exclude”, which I did the other day. So, instead of having a fresh archive which consisted of exactly the files I wanted, I wound up with an archive which also included the files I didn’t want and with a name I didn’t expect.

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Preventing image theft

We’re getting a little annoyed with some webmasters out there who continue to link directly to some of the images on our website. As far as we’re concerned, this practise equates to theft because they’re using the bandwidth we pay for. By adding these four lines to our .htaccess file, we have now put a stop to the pilfering:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?lutrov\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*$
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F]

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Automatic MySQL Backup

If you need to archive your MySQL databases in a Linux environment, there’s no better tool than Harley’s AutoMySQLBackup.

The main script features include:

• Backup multiple MySQL databases with one script.
• Backup all databases to a single backup file or to a separate directory and file for each database.
• Automatically compress the backup files to save disk space using either gzip or bzip2 compression.
• Can backup remote MySQL servers to a central server.
• Runs automatically using cron or can be run manually.
• Can email the backup log to any specified email address.
• Can email the compressed database backup files to the specified email address.
• Can specify maximum size backup to email.
• Can be set to run PRE and POST backup commands.
• Choose which day of the week to run weekly backups.

Easy to setup, configure and, combined with cron, really useful too.

Deleting old files in Linux

While the Linux find command has a number of uses, the most obvious being looking for files matching full or partial names, the one often underused option is to use it to locate old files. To show all files in /tmp/ivan/ older than 7 days:

find /tmp/ivan/* -mtime +7 -print

An even more powerful option is to use the -exec switch which allows you to delete old files. To delete all files in /tmp/ivan/ older than 7 days:

find /tmp/ivan/* -mtime +7 -exec /bin/rm -rf {} \; 2>/dev/null 1>&2

See this man page for details.