Sometimes you can’t be bothered to install and setup a command-line mail client and/or VPN, but you still need to access a POP 3 server from a remote machine. Sometimes you just need to know if a POP3 server is working or not. As a largely text-based protocol much like the HTTP protocol, telnet or [...]
Archive of entries posted on January 2009
Building from source package on Debian / Ubuntu to fix sudo PATH issue
So I’ve been kicking around an Ubuntu installation, hoping to replace my aging Fedora 5 deployment. Last time I touched a Debian distro was…well…sufficiently long ago that it’s more or less all new to me. What’s less new is the sudo path inheritance issue — this one’s been around. Ubuntu’s sudo hard-codes its PATH variable [...]
check last exit status code in bash shell
In case you’re curious (while debugging a program or a script) about the exit status code returned by the last shell command you ran, the incantation to retrieve it in the bash shell is: echo $? Given the nature of this variable (no one indexes text like ‘$?’), it’s annoyingly hard to Google for.
Apple Remote Desktop black screen and old machines
There appears to be some sort of limitation on screen colors when using ARD 3.2.2 to control an older Mac remotely. The symptom of this is a black screen when you attempt to Observe or Control the remote machine. Unfortunately, this same symptom usually appears when you have a blocked network port (ARD uses TCP [...]
