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Monthly Archives: January 2013

Take a screenshot of a VirtualBox Guest from a Linux Host

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A really great yet unknown feature that you can use with VirtualBox is the ability to take a screenshot of a running guest system. By using the VBoxManage controlvm command-line utility (see https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#vboxmanage-controlvm for more) of VirtualBox you can do this very quickly and easily.

I’m using an Ubuntu host machine, however I believe you can do the same with MAC or Windows hosts. For example I have a VM guest named stingray and I want to take a screenshot of the current state and screen of the guest machine – to do so I run the following command from my host Ubuntu computer:

 vboxmanage controlvm stingray screenshotpng stingrayscreen.png

Now I should have an image named stingrayscreen.png in the path area that I ran the above command!

Concrete5 and Plone CMS tools

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There are so many CMS systems available today, however two products that are well worth a look are concrete5 http://www.concrete5.org and Plone http://plone.org which are both FOSS Free and Open Source.

Concrete5:

  • Online magazines and newspapers.
  • eCommerce sites.
  • Extranets and Intranets.
  • Government web sites.
  • Small business web sites.
  • Non-profit and organization web sites.
  • Community-based portals.
  • Church, club and team web sites.
  • Personal or family homepages.
  • Marketing focused sites for a corporation.
  • Any school, college or university web site.
  • Many online communities.
  • Anything else you can dream up!

Plone:

  • A powerful, flexible Content Management Solution that is easy to install, use and extend.
  • Plone lets non-technical people create and maintain information for a public website or an intranet using only a web browser.
  • Plone is easy to understand and use — allowing users to be productive in just half an hour — yet offers a wealth of community-developed add-ons and extensibility to keep meeting your needs for years to come.
  • Blending the creativity and speed of open source with a technologically advanced Python back-end, Plone offers superior security without sacrificing power or extensibility.

 

Archey script – terminal info

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Archey is a handy script that can automatically display system information about your system every time you start the terminal in Linux. It displays details such as hostname, OS version and build, Kernel version, desktop environment, shell and more. It also displays a really cool colour logo of your distro as seen below on a Ubuntu computer.

archey_screen

To install Archey in Ubuntu, run:

sudo apt-get install lsb-release scrot
wget http://github.com/downloads/djmelik/archey/archey-0.2.8.deb
sudo dpkg -i archey-0.2.8.deb

 

Open-Source virtualization management for KVM and Xen

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ConVirt Open Source can be used for managing Xen and KVM, enabling you to standardize and proactively manage your virtualized environment in a centralized fashion. With ConVirt, you can create and provision “gold” images, diagnose performance problems, and balance load across the data center, all from a highly interactive Web based interface and with consistent feature set across open source virtualization platforms. As an open source product, ConVirt Open Source is free to download and use.

More information and download from Convirture: http://www.convirture.com/products_opensource.php

Wiki page and documentation:
http://www.convirture.com/wiki

cfg2html – Config to HTML utility

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Cfg2html is a UNIX shell script similar to supportinfo, getsysinfo or get_config, except that it creates a HTML (and plain ASCII) system documentation for HP-UX 10.xx/11.xx, Integrity Virtual Machine, SCO-UNIX, AIX, Sun OS and Linux systems. Plug-ins for SAP, Oracle, Informix, Serviceguard, Fiber Channel/SAN, TIP/ix, OpenText (IXOS/LEA), SAN Mass Storage like MAS, EMC, EVA, XPs, Network Node Manager and DataProtector etc. are included. The first versions of cfg2html were written for HP-UX. Meanwhile the cfg2html HP-UX stream was ported to all major *NIX platforms and small embedded systems.

Some consider it to be the Swiss army knife for the Account Support Engineer, Customer Engineer, System Admin, Solution Architect etc. Originally developed to plan a system update, it was also found useful to perform basic troubleshooting or performance analysis. The production of nice HTML and plain ASCII documentation is part of its utility.

Downloads and documentation from main site with links to the yahoo site for the tool here: http://www.cfg2html.com

Super Grub2 Disk – rescue Linux Bootloader

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Super Grub2 Disk http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk is a handy utility to help boot up a system that has a broken bootloader.

  • Detect any OS
  • Detect any GRUB2 configuration file (grub.cfg)
  • Detect any GRUB2 installation (even if mbr is overwritten)
  • Detect loop bootable isos (in /boot-isos or /boot/boot-isos/)
  • Enable GRUB2’s LVM support
  • Enable GRUB2’s RAID support
  • Enable GRUB2’s PATA support (to work around BIOS bugs/limitations)
  • Enable GRUB2’s USB support *experimental*
  • Enable serial terminal
  • List devices/partitions

 

glogg – log explorer search tool

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glogg enables you to use regular expressions to search for interesting events in your log files. It presents a results window which, together with complex regular expressions allows easy isolation of the meaningful lines amongst the noise.

glogg has been primarily developed to help spot and understand problems in huge logs generated by embedded systems. It can be equally useful to a sysadmin digging through logs from databases or web servers.

Main Features:

  • Runs on Unix-like systems, Windows and Mac thanks to Qt
  • Provides a second window showing the result of the current search
  • Supports grep/egrep like regular expressions
  • Colorizes the log and the search results
  • Displays a context view of where in the log the lines of interest are
  • Is fast and reads the file directly from disk, without loading it into memory
  • Follows a log that is written to disk in real time
  • Allow to insert marks in the logs to interesting lines
  • Supports vim/less like keyboard commands to move around the file
  • Is open source, released under the GPL

See website for more details http://glogg.bonnefon.org and it’s available in the Debian and Ubuntu repos or source tar balls. Also available for Windows.