Finding all files and folders that are different in two locations is extremely easy. Using only two parameters we can exhaustively compare two directories, including their sub-directories and produce a list of their differences as such:
diff -qr folder-1/ folder-2/;
The -q parameter instructs diff to print only the files that are different and thus not spam us with thousands of files that are the same.
The -r parameter turns on the recursive feature which instructs diff to check all sub-folders and their files in the two directories under investigation.
Recently, we came across a CentOS 7 that was executing MariaDB (MySQL) server. The Database Administrators needed a way to open to the port and allow connections to the SQL server from outside the machine. As they did not have a specific IP from which they would connect, we provided the following solution.
To temporarily open port 3306
firewall-cmd --add-port=3306/tcp;
To close the port 3306 (method A)
firewall-cmd --remove-port=3306/tcp;
or reload firewalld which will cause it to loose all changes that are not permanent (method B)
firewall-cmd --reload;
firewalld (Dynamic Firewall Manager) tool provides a dynamically managed firewall. The tool enables network/firewall zones to define the trust level of network connections and/or interfaces. It has support both for IPv4 and IPv6 firewall settings. Also, it supports Ethernet bridges and allow you to separate between runtime and permanent configuration options. Finally, it supports an interface for services or applications to add firewall rules directly.
Recently we decided to give it a go with SymfonyPHP framework on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Below you will find the commands we executed to install the skeleton project of symfony with some comments.
Composer
To install symfony, you need composer which is a dependency manager for PHP. The version of composer that was available in apt when this post was written was “very” old. Specifically, it had version Composer 1.6.3 2018-01-31 16:28:17. For this reason we decided to go with the version that is available in the official website of composer. The steps we followed were the ones below:
# Update our system
sudo apt update -y;
sudo apt upgrade -y;
# Install dependencies
sudo apt install curl php-cli php-mbstring git unzip php-xml -y;
# Get composer installer from the official site
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer -o composer-setup.php;
# Verify the the download was not corrupt by checking the sha384 sum of the installer file
HASH=`curl https://composer.github.io/installer.sha384sum | cut -d' ' -f 1`;
# If this step fails, go back to the curl command and try again, it would mean that there was a problem when downloading the installer from the net
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '$HASH') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
# Upon successfully validating the install, we can proceed to the actual installation.
sudo php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer;
source ~/.bashrc;
Symfony Skeleton Project
After the above steps are completed, we were able to proceed with the final step, which would be to create the symfony skeleton project via the composer with the following command in the folder named sandbox:
To verify the installation of the skeleton project we started a web server with PHP in the installation folder of the project and thus verify it through the browser:
cd sandbox;
# We did not use the port 80 as it would require root access to start
php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 -t public;
From a browser visiting http://127.0.0.1:8000/ we got to see:
Recently we tried to mount a Micro SD card that was formatted using the exFat format. To do so we used the build in card reader of a laptop that was running Ubuntu 18.04. To our disappointment, the OS was able to “see” the device as ‘/dev/mmcblk0’ but it could not automatically mount it.
First step we did was of course to update the system using:
sudo apt update;
and then we made sure we had all the necessary packages installed:
sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils;
Unfortunately, we still could not automatically mount the device. So we decided to try and mount it manually which also failed:
sudo mount -t exfat /dev/mmcblk0 /mnt/vmfs; FUSE exfat 1.2.8 ERROR: failed to read boot sector.
As we were not sure what was wrong we decided to do an experiment which turned out to be our solution: to use an external card reader and try again.. guess what? It worked!!
We will investigate further the issue with the build in card reader but for now we are able to work around the issue with the external card reader.
We needed a GNU/Linux command line formatter to beautify a huge JSON file we received. A solution we got our hands on was the json — JSON encoder and decoder. The usage was extremely easy and fast:
