mysql -u user -p[password] database -e "SELECT * FROM orders;".

You can also send the mysql client commands on stdin:

echo "SELECT * FROM orders" | mysql -u user -p[password] database

Or read them in with a file redirection

mysql -u user -p[password] database < /home/kirrus/orders.sql

That last one is really handy for reading MySQL dumps back into MySQL.

mv sessions sessions_full && mkdir sessions && chown www-data:www-data sessions

rm -rfv sessions_full

Or

find /loc/of/sessions -ctime +1 -type f -exec rm -v {} \;

Stopping domain name service: namedrndc: connect failed: connection refused

This seems to be a permissions bug in debian, quite a long lasting one. In order to cheat-fix it quickly, I do the following:

chown bind:root /etc/bind/rndc.key

chmod 660

/etc/init.d/bind9 restart

That seems to fix it well enough. I think it’s a problem in that bind starts as one user, but runs as another. It may be that 440 are all the perms that are necessary. The debian bug report is here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=169577

Most debian servers don’t have that in their cron job that deletes old session files.

So, you probably want to set it to store it’s session files in the default location (/var/lib/php5) or alter your cron job (/etc/cron.d/php5)

Fun!

Firefox Awesomebar search trick

A wonderful tip, that someone sent into the ubuntu-uk podcast. (I can’t remember who, or the episode. Comment if you know and I’ll credit them here! )

You can search, in any website’s search function, using firefox’s address bar. Now, at first glance this sounds really boring and useless, but it really isn’t, at all.

First, we need to find a website to search. Let’s use launchpad’s bugs search, for Ubuntu. So, we go here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/

Then, right click on the search box, and click “Add a keyword for this search”. This brings up the standard bookmark – your search keywords are stored as a bookmark. Give it a useful name, something to help you next time you go sorting through your book marks. Now, the keyword is how we use this trick. I’m going to use “bugs”, but you can use anything you want, just remember, this is the word you put before your search string in the address bar. Click Add.

Now, all we have to do, is to search for a bug. Let’s use the classic bug 1.

Open a new tab (CTRL + T), then in the address bar type [your keyword] microsoft market share, and hit enter.

Lo and behold:

Testing SMTP-AUTH the fast way

Found a really handy little command line program called “swaks”. Great if you’ve ever needed to test SMTP-AUTH, and didn’t want to have to base64 the username and password yourself. Here’s a quick rundown on the command and flags I use with them. (Should be fairly obvious, comment if not!)

swaks -s [smtp-server-name-or-ip] -au [smtp-auth-user] -ap [smtp-auth-password] -f [from-address-of-testing-email]

Hit enter, and it’ll ask you the “to” email address. Type it in, and it gives you the full connection readout, just as if you were doing it with telnet (or netcat) on the command line:

<- 220 smtp.our-domain.com ESMTP
-> EHLO gemini
<- 250-smtp.our-domain.com
<- 250-AUTH LOGIN
<- 250-AUTH=LOGIN
<- 250-PIPELINING
<- 250 8BITMIME
-> AUTH LOGIN
<- 334 Z29vZCB0cnkgOikK

And so on.