When automating mysqldump it is necessary to pass authentication information along with the command. While you can pass the credentials on the command line this is considered unsafe as the password would be visible to all users using the ps afx command (for example). A workaround for this is using expect a program that is meant to automate user interaction for terminal programs. IT simulates a tty and passes input to the controlled program depending on its output.

Windows XP is pretty old, but however, you may know those friends which are using quiet ooooold laptops, having a system crash but don't want to purchase a new one. When those laptops don't have a working CD-ROM drive anymore and ...

During the development of my Linux From Scratch I were searching for a way to test the boot process using Virtual Box instead of rebooting my development computer again and again. I found some articles on how to achive this using Windows, but I use Linux on my computer. Finally I did it :) using VBoxManage internalcommands. As I found no articles on this, here comes a short howto:

Sometimes it is nessesary to copy a Linux binary with its lib dependencies to a folder or archive. For example when creating an chroot emvironment, create an initramfs or copy a binary from one machine to another with the same architecture and kernel interface (this is hacky, yes) Because I frequently needed to do this, I wrote a small shellscript for that purpose. Here comes the shellscript, explanation will follow ...

This example converts ISO-8859-1 to UTF

Sometimes it is useful in bash scripts to resolve an IP address to a mac address. Here comes a simple script that perfroms this action:

Trying to establish a PPTP VPN Connection via Gnome NetworkManager (Ubuntu 9.10) I encountered some problems. While the connection not establish I got the following lines in my syslog.

Using /dev/random to create randomness in shell scripts