Author Archives: Michael Abboud
Huh? Why ‘service vmware-tools status’ no longer works on newer Linux VMs – Tip of the Week
After deploying a CentOS v6.6 VM via vCloud Director today, I was puzzled that I couldn’t confirm whether VMware Tools was running after installing it. [root@ZenOSS-POC ~]# service vmware-tools status vmware-tools: unrecognized service Huh? Surely not! [root@ZenOSS-POC ~]# ps -ef|grep … Continue reading
How to include a last login sessions report in the daily logwatch report run – Tip of the Week
A client wanted login session statistics to be included in the daily logwatch reports he received. The kind of stats he was looking for come from the last command: [root@asus ~]# last| head -25 mabboud pts/0 sainsw Thu Nov 1 … Continue reading
Ubuntu / Debian equivalent to yum check-update – Tip of the Week
…been searching for the equivalent command to yum check-update for Ubuntu and Debian, and thanks to some Google searching, found what I needed, as follows: 1. sudo apt-get update …to ensure you have the latest package index files, then 2. … Continue reading
VPNC and Mac OS X Lion, Mavericks (NOTE: Broken on Yosemite) – Tip of the Week
NOTE: Update 23 October 2014: This is broken on Yosemite because of tighter controls on unsigned kernel extensions. These are NO LONGER allowed to either load or run as unsigned extensions. This prevents the /dev/tun* or /dev/tap* devices from being … Continue reading
search / find by size on Unix / Linux systems – Tip of the Week
Searching by size on *nix systems by using the find command may not be readily apparent. Say you have a file system approaching 100% full (/var/log is an example which comes to mind), and you want to do some housekeeping. … Continue reading
Michael Abboud 
bash shell – Tip of the Week: Those pesky comments!
Have you grown tired of going through lines and lines of comments in a configuration file, when all you want to see is what parameters are actually set? Are you tired of using ‘grep -v‘ to eliminate the lines you … Continue reading →