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Hack and / - Lightning Hacks—the Command Next Door

Issue 206

From Issue #206
June 2011

Aug 31, 2011  By Kyle Rankin
 in
Even old commands (and old sysadmins) can learn new tricks.
Hear Your Pings

The problem with powerful server hardware is that it always takes a little time to reboot. Often when I have to reboot a server, I want to know the moment it comes back up, because I want to log back in and finish some work. Usually when I reboot a machine, I start a ping process, so I can watch to see when it is available. The problem is that servers seem to take just long enough to come back up that I end up getting distracted in another window on my desktop and don't see the ping replies. My solution to this is to make ping audible: 

$ ping -a 10.0.1.7

When you pass the -a command to ping, it generates an audible bell for every ping reply. I get to hear a few system beeps as the server goes down, and then I hear only silence. If I do become distracted and the server comes back, I immediately start hearing this annoying system beep in my ear and know the server is ready.

Kyle Rankin is a Systems Architect in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of a number of books, including The Official Ubuntu Server Book, Knoppix Hacks and Ubuntu Hacks. He is currently the president of the North Bay Linux Users' Group.

______________________

Kyle Rankin is a systems architect; and the author of DevOps Troubleshooting, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference, Linux Multimedia Hacks, and Ubuntu Hacks.

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ps -ef | grep -v blah etc...

Yves@sollerS's picture
Submitted by Yves@sollerS (not verified) on Fri, 08/26/2011 - 07:52.

This, is why pgrep was written:

$ pgrep -fl cron

great tricks

ben's picture
Submitted by ben (not verified) on Mon, 08/22/2011 - 18:35.

Im passing this around at the office tomorrow. These are key areas I deal with every day.

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