VIM quickies

Just discovered a quick and easy way in vim to convert a multi-line command (saperated by a \) into 1 line.


In normal mode, type:
$xj0y$k$pjdd

This will convert

eval --some-very-long-long \
--command "that spans two lines"


into


eval --some-very-long-long --command "that spans two lines"

ASP #include file Parent Paths error

Spent almost half a day trying to troubleshoot why some ASP scripts refuse to work when ported over from Windows Server 2003 to Win Server 2008 R2.

Turns out the offending line is this:
<!--#include file="../somefile.inc"-->

After a bit more google-ing, it's obvious that the problem lies in IIS 7.0 and above configuration that set Enable Parent Paths to False by default.

Solution was simple:

Go to IIS Manager, Default Web Site | (feature view) IIS | ASP | Enable Parent Paths = True

Force user logout

Just discovered a convenient way to kill (force logout) users in linux/unix.

pkill -KILL -i user

Solaris slow login script

Recently, I have a consistent complain from a user about very slow SSH logins to Solaris 10.

I've tried various method to debug, looking into all sort of possible network issues. I set LookupClientHostnames to no. I even tried UseDNS no but the SSH that came with Solaris 10 doesn't recognize that command. BEWARE!! UseDNS in your sshd_config file will cause SSH to not be able to start!

At the end, I decided to time my startup script in /etc/profile

It appears that /usr/sbin/quota takes more than 20s to run. So the solution was to either modify /etc/profile and /etc/.login, or to do a touch .hushlogin in the user's home directory.

I opted for the latter.