After using a linux virtual machine that has been configured with dynamically expanding drive, the size gets larger even if you remove files from it.

Here is the steps to shrink your linux virtual machine size :

1- Remove any unnecessary files you don’t need from the virtual machine.

2- Fill the unused spaces on it with zeros.

• Open the virtual machine.
• Install zero free

sudo apt-get install zerofree

• Reboot the machine in repair mode, and login to root shell
• Kill any processes using the hard disk.

service rsyslog stop
service network-manager stop
killall dhclient

• list your virtual machine harddisks

df

• Unmount and Fill all the unused spaces for each physical drive on the machine with zeros.

mount -n -o remount,ro -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /
zerofree /dev/sda1

• Shutdown the machine.

3- Clone the old HD file into a new shrinked one

VBoxManage clonehd oldHd.vdi newHd.vdi

4- Now add the new cloned HD file as the new HD for the machine and test it.

5- Remove your old HD file.

Use these steps to speed your internet browsing requests on Ubuntu, by enabling local DNS cache :

1- Run this command to install dnsmasq package

sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

2- Modify the file :

sudo gedit /etc/dnsmasq.conf

change the line :

#listen-address=

To :

listen-address=127.0.0.1

3- Modify the file :

sudo gedit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf

Ucomment the line :

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

4- Add the DNS 127.0.0.1 to your connection through your connection manager

Your DNS servers should be :

127.0.0.1,8.8.8.8,4.2.2.4

5- Restart your connection

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

To check if it is working issue the following command twice:

dig php-architect.com | grep 'Query'

first response will be like :

;; Query time: 96 msec

run the previous command again

dig php-architect.com | grep 'Query'

Response now should be :

;; Query time: 0 msec

This will speed your browsing especially in pages with many HTTP requests.

This is a handy command that i use to backup or export, compress and upload a mysql database to my remote host, very handy when you wanna upload your development database to the remote host after some changes.

/usr/mysql/bin/mysqldump --opt -uUsername -pPassword Databasename  | gzip -c | ssh -q user@remote-host.com 'cat > ~/Databasename.sql.gz'

Replace the following :

• /usr/mysql/bin/mysqldump : The path for mysqldump on your localmachine
• Username : Username for local mysql database.
• Password : Password for local mysql database.
• Databasename : Name of the database to export.
• user@remote-host.com : the user and the IP or the address of the remote host.

the above command will upload the compressed database to your home directory on the remote host, to change the directoy, replace ~/ with the path you want.

Virtual box has this little secret, the Command Line interface (CLI), this is very useful for users who wants to manage their virtual boxes on headless servers.

Question is why using command line while you have a nice easy to use GUI, the answer is POWER. you can do anything with the virtual box command line, you can create virtual machines, modify their settings, take snapshots, start and shutdown them.

VBoxManage supports everything the graphical user interface does, and much more.

VBoxManage has its share of Virtual Box documentation, you can find it here http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html

Tried to search online for a way to increase the size of a vdi image, and there was no solution available online to do so.
I had windows XP installed on a virtual machine for mail, and testing purposes on the most hated IE6, and the drive ran out of a space, no solution or work around helped me increase it, all the solutions to modify the partition table, etc didn’t work for me.
Here is the simple steps i followed :

• Add Another Disk Drive to the Guest OS
• Backup the Guest Operating system drive using Norton Ghost to the newly added drive.
• Copy the backup to a DVD image (I had to move it to the host drive first)
• Make a new Virtual Machine with the new size you want.
• Boot the new machine using Norton Ghost drive, and attach the DVD image with the created backup.
• Restore the backup from the DVD created using Norton Ghost.
• Restart the machine and you should have a working.
• Delete the created DVD image, the extra hard disk, and the old machine.

If you have a shorter solution, please share

I have been having issues trying to install Zend Server on Ubuntu 10.04 following the steps here http://files.zend.com/help/Zend-Server-5-Community-Edition/zend-server.htm#deb_installation.htm
the problem was because there is a missing dependency for the “libmysqlclient15off” MySQL client library

to solve this, I had to install “libmysqlclient15off” from here (select the one that matches your architecture)

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/m/mysql-dfsg-5.0/

Then install it using the command line :

dpkg -i libmysqlclient15off_5.1.30really5.0.83-0ubuntu3_i386.deb

after that running the installation for Zend server from through repositories, will work with no interruptions.

One of the common problems i used to face is transferring large files from Linux through mediums that doesn’t support large files, especially when it comes to more than 100 GB files, usually that is a virtual machine hard disk, or backup file.

To compress and split files under linux, this command can be used:

tar -cvj large-file.dvi | split -b 1000m -d - "small-files.tar.bz."

This command will compress and split the “large-file.dvi” to many files with size 1000mb for each, giving it the name “small-files.tar.bz.0, small-files.tar.bz.1, etc….”

To join the files together again, this command can be used:

cat small-files.tar.bz.* > large-file.tar.bz

and to extract the output file :

tar -xvj large-file.tar.bz

I wanted to post this since a while.

The recruitment system is one of the applications I built for cha-international while working there beside developing the Middle East & North Africa travel awards system, mail marketing system, and converting all their servers from windows to Linux.

In brief the system has the following features :

• Backend :

1. Managing countries, Nationalities, Languages, World Areas, System Announcements.
2. Managing Education Levels, Industries, Titles, Departments, System Reply Messages, Candidate Status, Candidates Classifications, and Quotes.
3. Testimonials section where the company can post its clients testimonials to be displayed in the frontend.
4. Managing 2 types of resumes : Uploaded Attachments, and Detailed filled forms Resumes.
5. Easy form for the data entry team to add the resumes from the backend.
6. Searching for candidates, using simple forms like name, email or advanced one which contains name, different nationalities, different languages, age, sex, industry, title, keyword in resume, etc.
7. Consultants area where they can post / close job posting, search  for candidates, export word version of resumes, add to their favorite list, recommend them to another consultant.
8. Consultants also can comment on the resumes, change their availability status to be seen by other consultants, and communicate with the candidate through the reply messages and keep track of those sent messages.
9. The system has a approval workflow engine, the admins have to check the resume to approve it first.
10. The system has a privileges section where the administrator can create a new role, assign access to certain areas in the backend to certain role, and assign the roles to system users.
11. Feedback system where the backend users can communicate with the administrator for support tickets, etc.
12. Auditrail system where every action in the system is logged.

• Frontend:

1. Simple upload form where users can just upload their resume and simple details.
2. Advanced profile form where users can fill in all the details, and add many attachments to their profiles.
3. Listing, Simple search, advanced search for jobs, and applying to them.
4. Clients area where they can request certain services.
5. Featured profiles, where a certain profiles selected by the admins showed in frontend.

The project was completely built from scratch using Zend Framework, and right now it has more than 70,000 applicant in its database, and the system is as fast as you see in the videos, these demos were taken with 50,000 record in the database.

Please don’t give me any feedback on the design , I am just a developer.

Here is some videos describing the different features of the system, I will try to post a better quality ones later.

 

Change your Signature

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXMg4q43Vf0

 

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Search Resumes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUCuQ3XZmHg

 

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Apply as New Candidate

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNMVIahQAeU

 

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Send Feedback to support

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QiwYphCi2k

 

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Consultant Functionality walk through

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU6MDYO-xsw

 

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Check who applied for your job

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7_ZNVjksKg

 

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Apply for Posted Job

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B06xlZr8A-w

 

Was looking for a way to grep for something in a subdirectory and stopped by this short but usefull Solaris How To list.

The grep item works with unix / linux boxes as well.

http://jeffnester.com/howtos/solaris/solaris.html

enjoy the power of shell

After updating to Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”, i had some problems with Zend Studio GUI, some buttons when clicked appear to be pressed, but no action follows.

After searching for a while i found this fix in Zend support pages, and it solved the issue

here is the link for the fix :
http://kb.zend.com/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=435