David Trebacz Blog

I was looking for a simple method to understand regular expressions. In this particular case it was to analyze an ignore rule used by logcheck log monitoring tool. I knew that the Linux environment offered some powerful tools to use regular expressions, but I was looking for a simple pass in this string and show me what matches via my regular expression. After quite a bit of time looking at man pages for grep, I initially didn't find the simple solution that I was hoping to... AMD-ubuntu /USR/SBIN/CRON[9999]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) And it was ignored by the entry in /etc/logcheck/ignore.d.paranoid/cron ^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ /USR/CRON\[[0-9]+\]: \([_[:alnum:]-]+\) CMD \(.*\)$ The log entry I wanted to ignore was: Nov 2 19:17:01 AMD-ubuntu CRON[6877]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) The regular expression that I ended up using to ignore my routine CRON job log entries was: ^\w...

My upgrade to 9.10 Karmic Koala was less than smooth. Some of it may have to do with the machine being upgraded many times (starting with Hardy Heron -I think) and some of it may be due to running on PPA repositories during the last release to get the benefits of a of KDE 4.3.2 and upgrade Kopete and Digikam. The initial instalation failed leaving the machine at a command prompt. I then ran sudo dpkg --configure -a The only complaint was about my Apache configuration file. I decided to merge it and move merrily on. I rebooted, and everything seemed fine. That is until I realized that BackupPC (a backup solution I really like), wasn't running and neither was Apache. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start started Apache running. Apache started without any complaints, but BackupPC wasn't running. sudo /etc/init.d/backuppc start Everything was running as planned. Unfortunately on restart Apache started, but BackupPC didn't. I assumed it was something hosed in the init.d ...