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Get a list of Mageia Linux mirrors providing rsync connectivity for Mageia 4 release
Need to find a Mageia Linux mirror server providing Mageia 4 via rsync? Modify the "url=" string for the version you want. This shows i586 which is the 32bit version. If you want the 64bit version it is: url=http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.4.x86_64.list; wget -q ${url} -O - | grep rsync:

Clear filesystem memory cache

erase content from a cdrw

Ctrl+S Ctrl+Q terminal output lock and unlock
These are simple shortcuts to pause and continue terminal output, works in most terminals and screen multiplexers like screen. You can use it to catch something if things change too fast, and scroll with Shift + PgUp PgDown. On linux console ScrollLock can also be used.

Display IP : Count of failed login attempts
The lastb command presents you with the history of failed login attempts (stored in /var/log/btmp). The reference file is read/write by root only by default. This can be quite an exhaustive list with lots of bots hammering away at your machine. Sometimes it is more important to see the scale of things, or in this case the volume of failed logins tied to each source IP. The awk statement determines if the 3rd element is an IP address, and if so increments the running count of failed login attempts associated with it. When done it prints the IP and count. The sort statement sorts numerically (-n) by column 3 (-k 3), so you can see the most aggressive sources of login attempts. Note that the ':' character is the 2nd column, and that the -n and -k can be combined to -nk. Please be aware that the btmp file will contain every instance of a failed login unless explicitly rolled over. It should be safe to delete/archive this file after you've processed it.

Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.

Bitcoin Brainwallet Private Key Calculator
A bitcoin "brainwallet" is a secret passphrase you carry in the "wallet" of your brain. The Bitcoin Brainwallet Private Key Calculator calculates the standard base58 encoded bitcoin private key from your "brainwallet" passphrase. The private key is the most important bitcoin number. All other numbers can be derived from it. This command uses 3 other functions - all 3 are defined on my user page: 1) brainwallet_exponent() - search for Bitcoin Brainwallet Exponent Calculator 2) brainwallet_checksum() - search for Bitcoin Brainwallet Exponent Calculator 3) b58encode() - search for Bitcoin Brainwallet Base58 Encoder Do make sure you use really strong, unpredictable passphrases (30+ characters)! http:brainwallet.org can be used to check the accuracy of this calculator.

prevent accidents while using wildcards
alternative for "echo rm *.txt". Just doubletab the command you are willing to use and it will show you the affected files.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

vmstat/iostat with timestamp
Also useful with iostat, or pretty much anything else you want timestamped.


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