Linux

Watching your Raspberry Pi

So I’ve installed a Raspberry Pi and it’s been running smoothly day in, day out. I’d like it to stay that way, but as the server is running it’s gathers lint in log files, databases grows and knowing how the load on CPU and memory is utilized through out time, I was looking for a tool which could help me to solve this problem.

As fun as it might be to build your own solution, I’ve learned to appreciate ready to use solutions, and it seems a nice little tool is available called RPi-Monitor. Assuming you run the Raspbian, the RPi-Monitor is available as a package ready to install through the standard package manager (once you’ve added the package repository).

Beware of DNS

For some time the server running this site had been acting up. Page loads were slow, access through SSH seemed lagging and something was absolutely misbehaving.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly was going on, but nothing really made sense. there were plenty of disk space, memory was reasonable utilized (no swapping) and the CPU load seemed to be less than 0.1 at any time - there were no good reason the server was “turtling” along at such a perceived slow pace.

Viewing EML files

As mails bounch around some email programs (I’m looking at you, Microsoft), seems to encrypt package forwarded mails in attachments with the extension .eml.

On Linux…

While Mozilla Thunderbird should be able to read them (as should Evolution), it requires you have the mail application available on your machine, but I haven’t - I’m doing just fine with GMail in the browser. So far the best solution I’ve find - assuming it’s trivial non-sensitive, personal files - that an Online viewer seems to work pretty well. My preferred solution is the free one from encryptomatic. It handles the mails quite nicely, it restores the formatting to something quite readable and even handles embedded images and attachments within the eml-file.

Salvaging a deleted message from Thunderbird

Suppose you got an important mail, but by accident deleted the message – and to make matters worse, you also decided that emptying the mailbox was a pretty neat idea. Is then time to Panic?

Well it might, but there is a chance you might be able to undelete the message – and quite easily if you’re on a Mac or a Linux machine. Here are the few steps, which has helped recover a lost mail or two… First close Thunderbird. Then located the mail directory (on Linux it’s located in the subdirectory .mozilla-thunderbird in you home directory – on windows most likely somewhere in C:\Documents and Settings*\Application Data\Thunderbird – In there you’re looking for the “Local Folders” directory.

Ubuntu: Changing your IP number

Sure it doesn’t happen that often, but sometimes you might need to change the IP number of your machine running Ubuntu. Either to configure it with a static IP number on your LAN or temporarily to configure a Wifi router - the latter being my case.

The first shot at changing the ip number, was going to the “System” menu, choosing Administration and Network Tools. It sounded just about right - but it’s wrong. Sure you view settings and some statistics, but it’s all read only.