Author Archives: admin

On ubuntu servers trying to unmount a frozen nfs mount, I see “device is busy”. When I try ‘df’ I see an Input / Output error for this partition.  When I try ‘ls -la’ I see question marks ? where … Continue reading →

After installing DropBox, my CVS icons disappeared. Here is where I found a good summary and potential solutions to the problem. In my case the solution was simply to remove the DropBox program, and voila.

Depending on how many pages you have, your navigation might not (probably won’t) line up evenly. To fiddle with it, i add this to my custom theme’s style.css file and vary the number (15) until it looks right: .page_item { … Continue reading →

While building a wordpress site and needed to work with a separate existing database. Added a function in wp-includes/functions.php like this: function my_query($sql){ $db = @mysql_connect(“my_DB_host”, “DB_usr”, “DB_pass”); mysql_select_db(“my_other_database”); $result = mysql_query($sql) or die(‘Did not get required database result’); return … Continue reading →

I work on remote machines fairly often. Sometimes a software install will ask for a reboot. But when you click the “Start” button, the options aren’t there! Right click on the task bar at the bottom and go to task … Continue reading →

I’m moving a database from MSSQL to MySQL, I was cruising along with CSV files until I hit a table that has some date columns. They weren’t showing up right no matter what, until I found this post: http://abbyandwin.net/blog/2007/08/14/how-to-convert-mssql-date-format-to-mysql Here’s … Continue reading →

Still considering whether it will be worth purchasing vCenter software, for now I am getting by with the free tools supplied by VMWare. To clone a new VM from one ESXi host to another, I powered it down and used … Continue reading →

We have a CVS repository on linux and Tortoise CVS users on windows. Sometimes we need to move our repository and users start seeing the subject error. Wasted time looking into it, has to do with UTF-8 stuff going from … Continue reading →

Handbrake is a great tool for encoding video. Best of all it is open source and free. If you are running Ubuntu server, here are the steps to install it quickly and painlessly! $ sudo su # apt-get install python-software-properties … Continue reading →

I have a brand new USB drive and I want to backup some contents on my server. I hooked up the drive and type “mount -t ext3 /mnt/usb /dev/sdc1” but the drive is not formatted so this gave me an … Continue reading →