sysadmin

Every developer has heard of 'vi' at least once in their life. That empty screen with a flashing cursos can be a little intimidating at first. After a few attempts of typing your text and nothing is echoed back to the screen, than it becomes really intimidating. :)
To help those out there who want to be able at least to quit vi editing without closing their Terminal window, here are a few tips and basic commands.
The first thing you should know about vi is that it has two modes of operation:

Being a flavor of Unix (in some level) it is possible to set some aliases in your Mac Os shell.
All you have to do is open your Terminal and type the commands below, or something else that suits more your taste.

• vi ~/.bash_profile

Once the file is open in vi, just add the following lines (well you do know how to do basic vi editing, right?)

A few weeks ago I wrote another article explaining how to install and run Atlassian JIRA in Ubuntu. Well, I was not quite satisfied with the results, so I tried another approach and it seems to be working better now as my previous JIRA installation was extremely slow and crashed due to Out of Memory errors.

So here are the steps:
1. Install Java

I use Atlassian JIRA as a tool to control my software development process, registering issues, tasks and bugs and planning development cycles.
So now that I switched to Ubuntu as development platform, I need to setup JIRA on my new Linux machine. I wrote down the steps I followed to achieve this.

1. Install Java
First of all, of course, install Java in your Ubuntu server and test the installation:

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on how to install Subversion and Apache in a Windows environment and another article about how to install those in a Linux environment.

I just installed Ubuntu 9.10 (the Karmic Koala, as they call it) at my home Desktop. First thing I tried was to check whether my ssh daemon was running, and it wasn't. I did have the ssh client but not the scripts to start the server, but no panic. It is quite fast to fix this. Jut open a terminal window and type the following to install OpenSSH.

sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client

I did not need the client as I had it installed already. Here is the result from the command above:

Applications usually generate a huge amount of log files. Some logging utilities available to programming languages already have the rotating (or rolling) functionality. If this is not the case and you are using some flavor of Linux or Unix to run your system, you might use the logrotate utility. Check if you have it available by typing:

[definenull@hm1446 prp]$ whereis logrotate
logrotate: /usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf /etc/logrotate.d /usr/share/man/man8/logrotate.8.gz

This is an interesting presentation by the Flickr team on how (actually more the "why" than the "how") to achieve the best integration of developers and system operators. Simply put, "the team's job is to enable business".