If you got this virus (or know someone who did), and it is spreading to all of your MSN contacts with something like the following message :

hey How are you???? this is ur pic rite?!<br /> http://www.msn- gallery.com/gallery.php?user=some_nickname.jpg

or in French something like :

http://msn-friends. iquebec.com/?photo=some_nickname<br /> ta tof fais koi sur ce site :P

Then you can use the following article (there is a removal tool) to get rid of it : How to Remove MSN Virus Project 1/ Generic2.EXO / Backdoor.Generic3.SAT

Happy Easter to everyone ! Enjoy the chocolate 😉

A common problem when you deal with a pool of servers (clusters or server farms, you name it) is to execute the same command line on each server. It is usual to solve this with a “for” construct such as :

for i in server1 server2 ; do ssh $i "uname -a"; done

But this is basically re-inventing the wheel everytime. Here comes Distributed Shell (DSH).

I’m back from a 3-day-training about clusters with Linux which was pretty exciting, and here are the main points which were covered :

• Vitualization with Xen
• Sharing data with GFS / GNBD
• Clusters with RedHat Cluster Suite
• Load Balancing with Linux Virtual Server (LVS)

This little Perl one-liner can get handy when you need to translate “time in seconds since the Epoch” (for example in logs) to local time :
% perl -e 'print scalar(localtime(1202484725)), "\n";'<br /> Fri Feb 8 16:32:05 2008<br /> %

This was pretty useful today when browsing through Nagios event logs, where times are given in seconds from the Epoch.

By the way, the Epoch is defined as 00:00 UTC on January, 1st, 1970.

ITIL Methodology advises that every RFC (Request For Change) be run through the CAB (Change Advisory Board).

What’s that all about, and why ? Read on !

If you downloaded an ISO file and you want to mount it into your filesystem, you can proceed as follows :
spaghetti% sudo losetup /dev/loop0 cdrom.iso<br /> spaghetti% sudo mount /dev/loop0 /mnt<br /> spaghetti% ls /mnt<br /> Autorun.inf setup.exe setup.ico<br /> spaghetti%<br /> [...]<br /> spaghetti% sudo umount /mnt<br /> spaghetti% sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

This will use the feature known as “loop devices”, which lets you use a file as a device, and subsequently mount it as it would be one.

As you might have read in my previous post about accessing your cell phone with the AT-commands under Linux.

If not, you might want to start there for a little context.

I finally wrote and released on CPAN a Perl module which will help to automate cell phone operations such as saving/restoring the phonebook or sending an SMS.

Examples are included in the documentation. I believe I made it easy to use, but let me know if I’m wrong 😀 .

This article explores your options to access your GSM cell phone from a linux system, and manipulate SMS and phonebook entries.

Doesn’t provide hints about how to unlock a GSM cell phone though 😉

When you perform a pattern matching with multiple “or” (|) clauses, such as /pattern1|pattern2|pattern3/, Perl regexp engine will try to match each of them one after the other in sequence, resulting in poor performance if you have a long list of “or” clauses.

In order to optimize such a pattern matching, you can use the Regexp::Assemble module.