Adding programs to the "Send To" menu

From time to time I write small scripts that accept Command line arguments. In the past I kept shortcuts to them on my desktop, but today I wanted to remove all icons from my desktop.

If you open up %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo in Windows Explorer.

You see %APPDATA% is an environment variable that usually maps to something like C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USER PROFILE]\Application Data\ in Windows 2000/XP and "C:\Users\[YOUR USER PROFILE]\Application Data\" in Windows Vista.

Let's say you wanted to add an item to the Send To menu to shred files with sdelete. You could just drag a shortcut to the shred script this folder, or create a new shortcut.

This method should work for any application that allows you to open a file by using a command line argument.

mail command returns fseek Invalid argument, panic temporary file seek

Today I logged into one of our older servers, haven't logged into it for a while and saw that there was new mail (as always given the number of cron jobs running).

Below is the output of my command.

[root@server /]# mail 

"/var/spool/mail/root": 1832 messages 1777 new 1832 unread 

fseek: Invalid argument 

panic: temporary file seek

After a little bit of searching online I found two possible and simple solutions.

If you want to read the mail try using mutt instead of mail. It doesn't have a problem with the 2GB file size of the mail box that mail did.

If you don't care about the old stuff you can run:

rm -f /var/spool/mail/root

to remove the file and then

cat /dev/null > /var/spool/mail/root

to recreate a blank file.  

I ended up reading the mail I wanted and then blowing the file away.  But before I could recreate it there was already a new file with 62MB of mail in it.  

Excluding Directories from updatedb on CentOS 5

Running the updatedb command will update the slocate database.  However if you want to exclude certain directories for any reason, such as not wanting to include a huge NFS file store or something to that affect you have two options.

1) use the -e switch with a comma seperated list of directories to not index. (updatedb -e /Storage,/home)

2)edit the /etc/updatedb.conf file.

•  vi /etc/updatedb.conf
  
• find the PRUNEPATHS section and add the directories to the list seperated by spaces. (PRUNEPATHS = "/afs /media /net /sfs /tmp /udev /var/spool/cups /var/spool/squid /var/tmp /Storage /home")

Also you can read up on updatedb by reading the man pages.

man updatedb

error: can't create transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/__db.000

I got the error message today while upgrading Webmin.  The fix for this is pretty simple:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.0*

rpm --rebuilddb

The first command clears out any of the files that will lock an RPM from running.  The second command rebuilds the RPM database.

Then I was able to install Webmin 1.470 from the RPM that I had downloaded with:

rpm -Uhv /Storage/rpmDownloads/webmin-1.470-1.noarch.rpm

memcached init.d statup scripts for CentOS 5.2.

While working to setup memcached on my CentOS servers I came across these scripts.  They are the typical startup, restart, shutdown, status scripts I am sure you are used to using.  

I found them on both http://www.dev411.com/wiki/Memcached_startup_files_for_Red_Hat_(RHEL) and http://www.vbseo.com/blogs/danny-bembibre/daemon-scripts-memcached-44/.  

Both sites have the same script contents but I feel that vbseo.com has the more complete instructions.

Please check your autoconf installation and the $PHP_AUTOCONFenvironment variable is set correctly and then rerun this script.

This is a very simple fix if you are running Redhat Enterprise / CentOS 5.2.  

yum install autoconf

I came across this while setting up memcache / memcached.  I had tried running phpize from the memcach-2.2.4 directory but was getting the error "Please check your autoconf installation and the $PHP_AUTOCONFenvironment variable is set correctly and then rerun this script."

Once I had autoconf installed I was able to finish the install process

./configure

make

make install

I know there are easier ways to do all of this on CentOS, but we are using a newer version of PHP (5.2.6) than came with CentOS (5.1.6), so using yum to install this would not have worked.

How to: mod_expires & mod_deflate in Apache running on CentOS 5

While trying to improve the performance of our internal workflow I was tasked with setting up mod_deflate and mod_expires, based off of Yahoo's! Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website.

The nitty gritty of these two is to make sure they are both listed in your httpd.conf file:

LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

Since this server is running the default CentOS 5 apache I already had the support I needed.  I then continued on to find the documentation online. Both modules support vhost context so that is the route I went with. I added the lines below to each vhost that I wanted the settings to take place for.

ExpiresActive On

                ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000

                ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

                ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

                ExpiresByType text/css A2592000

                ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A2592000

                ExpiresByType application/pdf A2592000

        

The syntax for the ExpiresByType directive is:

ExpiresByType mime/type TimeInSeconds. 

The A2592000 is Access time + one month.  If I wanted the file to be cached for one month from modification date I would have done M2592000 instead.

Other handy numbers in seconds:

86400 = One Day

604800 = One Week

2592000 = One Month

31536000 = One Year (365 Days)

157680000 = Five Years

3153600000 = Ten Years

Why might these large numbers come in handy?  Well you want to set far future expiration dates for things that don't change often.  The catch is if you need to update one of these items with a far future expiration date.  You have to change the file name.  Modify the case of the filename will work in the short term but really you want to start adding version strings to all of your static files like CSS and JavaScript.  

mod_deflate is much easier to setup.  Simply add the line:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/x-javascript text/css

Again based on the mod_deflate documentation you can add this directive to the vhost directives.  Please note that this directive can be placed on just about any context level and as such is very powerful.  Also note that you should not try to compress image file because they are already compress and it really is just a waste of CPU and time.

Using these two methods we where able to reduce our website on a first visit from 190.7Kb total to 157.3Kb total.

Before:

9.4K HTML/Text

32.1K Javascript

12.9K Stylesheets

0.4K CSS Images

135.9K Images

190.7K Total

After:

3.1K HTML/Text

15.0K Javascript

2.9K Sytlesheets

0.4K CSS Images

135.9K Images

157.3K Total

I also used the yuicompressor to minify our main Javascript and our CSS file.

After:

3.1K HTML/Text

12.3K Javascript

2.2K Sytlesheets

0.4K CSS Images

135.9K Images

154.0K Total

As you can see using mod_deflate to compress the Javascript and CSS is a more substantial savings in terms of bandwidth than trying to minify.

Granted based on my observations if we really wanted to save on bandwidth and make our pages load faster we would reduce the substantial image footprint.

In case anyone is wondering where I culled all of these numbers from I used Y! Slow for Firebug in Firefox.