Lifted from a TechRepublic.com email.
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MANAGE LARGE FILE LISTINGS WITH XARGS

Linux administrators have traditionally used the xargs command to manage

large argument lists, such as file listings. The xargs command also has
many other uses.

But handling long file listings is a very useful function. For example,
if you have a directory with a large number of files, you may have
experienced the "too many arguments" problem associated with trying to list or
delete files in a directory.

Let's say that you have a directory full of clip art and want to delete
all of the JPEG files. You attempt to use the following:

rm *.jpg

You may find that rm can't handle the large number of files, and the
command fails. You can still remove the files, but it requires the use of a
few extra commands.

Use the following command to remove all of the JPEG files from the
current directory and all subdirectories:

$ find . -type f -name '*.jpg' -print|xargs -l50 rm -f

This command uses the find command to locate all files in and below the
current directory with the name "*.jpg" and print them to standard
output. The command then pipes the output from find as input into xargs, which
then executes rm -f on a maximum of 50 files at a time.

You can use the xargs utility in many more situations. It's a powerful
tool that allows you to efficiently chain together commands that you
otherwise couldn't connect, manage files efficiently, and more.

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copy drive/partition image to ftp server:

ftp>put |"dd if=/dev/hdx bs=1M|gzip -1" diskimage.gz


copy image from ftp server and write to disk/partition:

get diskimage.gz ||gunzip|dd of=/dev/hdx bs=1M"

Oh yeah more information.

fs01 172.16.30.21
sql01 172.16.30.22
citrix01 172.16.30.23
fs02 172.16.30.24

Port Forwarding on Router:

172.16.30.23 64.220.64.212 3389
* * 1604
* * 1494
172.16.30.21 * 25 (smtp)
172.16.16.29 * 5993 (goldmine)
172.16.30.21 * 80 (www-http)

Router Config:

IP Address: 172.16.16.1/255.255.240.0
Default IP GW: 64.220.64.1
Backup GW: 0.0.0.0
Primary DNS: 207.155.184.72
Secondary DNS: 206.173.119.72
Domain Name:
Receive RIP: Both
Transmit RIP: Off


Dest NetMask Next GW Priority Enabled
Static Routes: 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 64.220.64.1 Low Yes

WAN 1 Interface ATM SDSL, fw v1.1.8

Mostly stuff related to consulting (3D)

SBC Customer Service Number is 800 244-4444
SBC Dialup ISP access numbers 866 722-3425

CoreCom dialup for Joliet 846-3539

Bye

Ahhhhh!!.. That's better.

I was having problems with the post/publish page. When Opera is in MSIE 6.0 mode, this box shows up as a single line across the page, which makes it difficult to review what you are writing. When Opera is in Opera mode, this box has 10 lines and makes it much easier to read and revise.

I am attempting a bootable W2kAdvSrv CD slipstreamed with SP3. I had to download and compile Xcdroast to continue. I'll post my findings when I'm finished. It's done compiling. later...

Just a quick update. I went to the Super Scientific Circus show at the Rialto Theatre with my son's 5th grade class. It was alot of fun.

I found another web based accounting program called ARIA. It was developed out of the frustration of other NOLA users. I had problems installing and getting NOLA to work, but this one loaded up just fine. I like the back-to-basics of the pages. No funky graphics, just text links. I haven't checked the site information too much yet, but I imagine that functionality is more important to the developers than fashion. Thus the elimination of the graphical buttons. That should always be done after main development has taken place.

Well, I guess I'd better start upgrading and repairing Barry's computer.

Enjoy...

A scary thing happened to me yesterday when I was delivering papers. Since it was Saturday, the paper has a later delivery time of 7:00, so the sun was up just over the horizon. As I was headed East on McCarthy Road, I was facing directly into the sun, as well as oncoming car headlights. Whenever headlights, or sun are in my eyes, I usually look at the side of the road and use peripheral vision to see the road ahead. I did that this time, but after I turned, I noticed I had a blind spot and couldn't see in a particular area in my field of vision. This really concerned me. I thought it might be temporary, as you may know what happens when a flash goes off from a camera, but this wasn't a normal "dark spot" from the light. It was acually like an invisible area, nothing was there. After a few minutes I started to see wiggly or wavy lines or curves in the area affected. I pulled over and closed my eyes for a few minutes thinking this will subside, but after that my entire field of vision started to flicker.
I guess all of this was a reaction to the bright light, but it took me alot longer to finish the route, and I missed and had to go back to some drops. Things started to clear up after 15-20 minutes, and started to go back to normal. I was very weary of the sunligh the rest of the day. It had me worried. I told my wife, Monica about the incident. She asked why I didn't have a pair of sunglasses. Actually, I looked for some (she usually has several pair laying around), but there were none in the van, and every pari of sunglasses I have bought in the past have either been lost or broken. She bought me a pair later that day, and I wore them this morning.

Great story, huh?

Actually I left out some important thoughts going through my head at the time my vision was wacky. I thought how horrible it would be for my last images to be that of my paper route. I thought about my family and how I would have to remember their faces if my vision failed before I got home. I actually started to cry and think about what plan God has for me, if this is going to happen. Although some of this seems more trivial now, I was really worried at the time and wanted to mention these thoughts.

Perhaps I'm using this log too much, but I'm sure it will pass after the newness wears off.
I just got my friends PC via UPS and cracked open the case. It had stuff moving around inside, so I didn't want to take any chances of having something loose, or a piece of metal short the motherboard.
Well, after removing some old dried up rubber bands, a wad of some kind of brownish paper-bag-shredded-like dust, I turned the thing on and watched. Finds the hard drive, but won't load anything. Just a blank screen.
Fdisk shows a Windows NT partition, which is what is supposed to be on this system. I tried using Slackware 9.0 CDROM to boot and see if I could read the NTFS Partition, but ntfs isn't supported in the boot kernel, and the module isn't available. So I tried Mandrake 9.1 CDROM, since it has the NTFS resize option. But it had trouble mounting. I figured it was file corruption at the least.
So, upstairs we go. Pulled the skins off the kids Windows XP Pro computer and plugged the hard drive as slave and booted up. XP wanted to run a CHKDSK right away on the drive, but I bypassed, figuring it could be worse if repairs are made without knowing the status of the drive. So after a really long boot sequence I got the desktop. Of course I could hear the drive really working, re-reading man times over.
The drive is an IBM DeskStar, and it has jumper settings for 15/16 heads? I was wondering if the jumper was originally set for 15 when the drive was installed, and my friend, in the course of swapping different drives, switched the wrong jumpers and made it 16 instead of 15. So I powered off, switched jumper to 15 heads and rebooted. XP wanted to CHKDSK again and I refused, at the desktop XP wanted to format. I knew that was no good and shutdown, swapped jumpers back to 16 and started her up again. This time I let it CHKDSK. Lots of errors, but all corrected and it looks pretty good right now. At least most of the information on the drive is readable. I'm not sure if it will boot, but after I run a full disk scan for bad sectors I will throw it back into my friend's PC and see what happens. If it works, I will backup the drive, then try to shrink the partition using Mandrake and the ntfsresize program. If it works I'll be able to install a 2 GB W98 Partition, a 6 GB Linux Partition and the rest will be FAT32 for sharing between operating systems.
Time to check on the drive...

Ok, I was able to change the settings with Opera set as Opera and not as MSIE 6.0.

I was able to change the time zone settings. I am using Internet Explorer right now. I was using Opera for Linux (version 7.10 beta) when I was having problems with changing the settings. If I remember, I'll try some different settings in Opera to see if that makes a difference.

Now for the main reason I set this blog up in the first place.
I have a vpr matrix laptop, model 200a5. I have to send it in for repair, the DVD/CDRW drive crapped out. Before this, I had to send it in for a video problem, no display. I know it worked, because it would boot and I could see it on my home network. When I got it back, the display worked, but it no longer booted into Linux. It hung looking for, or setting up PCI/pcmcia services. I was able to disable the pcmcia setup, and it would boot and work normally, but when I ran the pcmcia startup script, it would hang. I decided to try to re-install the Windows XP Home edition that came witht the computer. It is a recovery disk, but it hangs after trying to switch to the graphics mode section of the setup. I even tried installing Windows 2000 Pro, but it hangs at "Setup is starting windows 2000" prompt. I noticed that the motherboard replacement from this last repair included an updated BIOS dated 10/11/02. (It's a Phoenix BIOS with Best Buy BIOS Version BM1 Q0F0B) If I disable the PNP, I get an error on booting stating that IRQ cannot be assigned to the PCI Serial Bus. (Warning IRQ not configured - PCI Serial Bus Controller on Motherboard Bus:00, Device:0C, Function:00)
Incidentally, since the DVD/CDRW drive was not working, I used Microsoft Windows 2000 RIS (Remote Installation Service) to boot via PXE and install Windows 2000. If you need to install 3rd party network or other drivers, you need to make a directory "$oem$" at the same level as the i386 directory. In that directory you can have various sub-directories for network adapter, modem, video, etc. Copy the .inf and .sys files from your driver into the appropriate directory and then edit the "ristndrd.sif" file in the "i386" directory, adding, or changing the following to [Unattended] section:

OemPreinstall = yes
OemPnPDriversPatch = "Drivers\network adapter;Drivers\modem;Drivers\video"

Of course, modify the correct pathnames to your driver.

The other thing I learned was that the F12 key does not work for the network bootup process. You need to press Fn+F12 in order for the PXE client to boot from the network.

OK Back to the repair. I am backing up my linux partition. I am using bzipped tar file.
tar -X exlude.filename -cjf /mnt/fat32/vprmatrix.tgz /

The exlude file included /mnt and /proc (although I didn't do the proc the first time.)
I suppose It ought to be named tbz or tar.bz since I used bzip instead of gzip, so I will rename the archive file to reflect that when it's done.

It took about 20 minutes to back up 2.5GB.

I can't seem to change any settings on this board. I want to change the time zone to Central Daylight, but it keeps telling me that the subdomain is already in use. Perhaps there is a period of time required before these things sync up. I'll try later.

I also don't like the way the ads cover up the description of this page. I'll see if another template might work, or perhaps they do it on purpose. After all, what do you want for nothing?

Well, I changed the template, that fixed the ad problem, but I still can't change time zone information, or any other settings yet.

First blog to see how this works