Archive for August, 2009

More Tab Complete Awesomeness on Ubuntu 9.04

It’s a slightly older post, but after I read Workswithu’s report on the four features that they believed set Ubuntu apart, I had to agree whole-heartedly with the fourth one regarding implementation of auto-complete on the shell. As I was reading, I constantly dropped to the shell to discover new tab-complete features that I didn’t know about, including apt-get that I really didn’t notice but used every day. Anyway, today I discovered yet another.

This kind of defeats the purpose of DNS, but I discovered that if you put a host into the /etc/hosts file on a Ubuntu 9.04, then both SSH and rsync tab-complete for you when you start typing the hostname. I’m not sure about scp, but I’m sure it works the same way.

Extending this functionality further, it would be awesome if I could tab-complete from my known_hosts file, but that doesn’t seem to work.

Anyway, if you find yourself SSHing or rsyncing files to a host or set of hosts all the time, this trick can be very time-saving. Perhaps not quite as time-saving as being able to SSH with the click of a mouse, but often its not very convenient to leave the keyboard just to save a few keystrokes at the shell.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Aug 5th, 2009

Zenoss SSH Troubles on Ubuntu 8.04

Fresh off a stack installer of Zenoss Core on Ubuntu 8.04, I had a little trouble with SSHing to other hosts using the Zenoss user. When I tried to SSH, I got a this error:
ssh: /usr/local/zenoss/common/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8: no version information available (required by ssh)
Segmentation fault

Segfault. That’s not cool..

After doing a quick search on Google, I found this suggestion in a mailing list:
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH

After ‘unsetting’ the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable by running that directly in the shell, I could SSH to my servers to perform my checks. I then added it to the end of my Zenoss user’s .bashrc script.

So far I haven’t seen anything broken, but will certainly report back if I do run into any issues. I’m not entirely sure what the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable does, but a quick Google search showed 3 results of people saying it was a bad idea to use it. Again, not sure but I give it a big “works for me” :)

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (4) : Aug 4th, 2009

Does Google Really Need to Worry About Bing?

At the end of July, a lot of blogs and news sites were quick to point out that Bing’s (collective with Yahoo) market share in the U.S. jumped by 1%. While it’s true, the Bing market share did a make a small jump from the time of its launch until now, it’s far too early to start noting any trends from the stats. For a bit of perspective, let’s take a look at this graph from Business Insider:

U.S. Market Share from Business Insider

As we can see, a gain of simply a percent can be seen as a plateau with a hopeful trend back upwards, but the Microsoft / Yahoo combined market share lost almost 10% over the last couple of years alone. Of course, time will tell on whether or not any real trends will come out of this, but it’s a bit early to start talking big about Bing..

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Aug 4th, 2009

Before Railing Apple or AT&T, Do You Know What Google Voice Does?

I had to laugh while browsing through comments on one of the articles on Digg about how the Google Voice App for the iPhone was rejected. While I would totally agree with the consensus that Apple is treating its developers poorly and walking on thin ice with them (I said it very nicely..), I’m thinking that the majority of them don’t understand at all what Google Voice is.

Google Voice is not a replacement for your home phone, cell phone, or any other phone you happen to have. It’s not about using your cell phone provider’s network to make phone calls so you don’t have to pay for them. It’s an enhancement to your phone – allowing you to hand out a single phone number to reach you at multiple phones. The service might be a “VoIP” service, but it’s no more of a “VoIP service” than the backend of your local phone company that reaches your home either digitally or via analog signal. Neither Apple nor AT&T have nothing to lose should Google Voice take off as it’s merely a filter in front of your devices.

That being said, Apple needs to stop denying apps to its store without explaining why. It’s getting out of hand. In Apple’s defense, there’s definitely some overlap with contact management, the ability to make phone calls, voicemail, and text message management. However, the Google Voice app rejection is just yet another sign in a broken system.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Aug 4th, 2009

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