Particularly useful if you're mounting different drives, using the following command will allow you to see all the filesystems currently mounted on your computer and their respective specs with the added benefit of nice formatting. Show Sample Output

Install SSHFS from http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html Will allow you to mount a folder security over a network. Show Sample Output

Makes a partition in ram which is useful if you need a temporary working space as read/write access is fast. Be aware that anything saved in this partition will be gone after your computer is turned off.

If the machine is hanging and the only help would be the power button, this key-combination will help to reboot your machine (more or less) gracefully. R - gives back control of the keyboard S - issues a sync E - sends all processes but init the term singal I - sends all processes but init the kill signal U - mounts all filesystem ro to prevent a fsck at reboot B - reboots the system Save your file before trying this out, this will reboot your machine without warning! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

"-o loop" lets you use a file as a block device

In my example, the mount point is /media/mpdr1 and the FS is /dev/sdd1 /mountpoint-path = /media/mpdr1 filesystem=/dev/sdd1 Why this command ? Well, in fact, with some external devices I used to face some issues : during data transfer from the device to the internal drive, some errors occurred and the device was unmounted and remounted again in a different folder. In such situations, the command mountpoint gave a positive result even if the FS wasn't properly mounted, that's why I added the df part. And if the device is not properly mounted, the command tries to unmount, to create the folder (if it exists already it will also work) and finally mount the FS on the given mount point. Show Sample Output

Found at: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=52

Create ISO image of a folder in Linux. You can assign label to ISO image and mount correctly with -allow-lowercase option.

This does not require you to know the partition offset, kpartx will find all partitions in the image and create loopback devices for them automatically. This works for all types of images (dd of hard drives, img, etc) not just vmkd. You can also activate LVM volumes in the image by running vgchange -a y and then you can mount the LV inside the image. To unmount the image, umount the partition/LV, deactivate the VG for the image vgchange -a n <volume_group> then run kpartx -dv <image-flad.vmdk> to remove the partition mappings. Show Sample Output

Yields entries in the form of "/dev/hda1" etc. Use this if you are on a new system and don't know how the storage hardware (ide, sata, scsi, usb - with ever changing descriptors) is connected and which partitions are available. Far better than using "fdisk -l" on guessed device descriptors. Show Sample Output

since fuse mounts do not appear in /etc/mtab (fuse can't write there, dunno if it would if it could) this is propably a better way.

Nothing fancy, just a regular filesystem scan that calls the badblocks program and shows some progress info. The used options are: -c ? check for bad sectors with badblocks program -D ? optimize directories if possible -f ? force check, even if filesystem seems clean -t ? print timing stats (use -tt for more) -y ? assume answer ?yes? to all questions -C 0 ? print progress info to stdout /dev/sdxx ? the partition to check, (e.g. /dev/sda1 for first partition on first hard disk) NOTE: Never run fsck on a mounted partition!

I needed a way to search all files in a web directory that contained a certain string, and replace that string with another string. In the example, I am searching for "askapache" and replacing that string with "htaccess". I wanted this to happen as a cron job, and it was important that this happened as fast as possible while at the same time not hogging the CPU since the machine is a server. So this script uses the nice command to run the sh shell with the command, which makes the whole thing run with priority 19, meaning it won't hog CPU processing. And the -P5 option to the xargs command means it will run 5 separate grep and sed processes simultaneously, so this is much much faster than running a single grep or sed. You may want to do -P0 which is unlimited if you aren't worried about too many processes or if you don't have to deal with process killers in the bg. Also, the -m1 command to grep means stop grepping this file for matches after the first match, which also saves time. Show Sample Output

Instead of using force un-mounting, it's better to find the processes that currently use the relevant folder. Taken from: http://www.linuxhowtos.org/Tips%20and%20Tricks/findprocesses.htm Show Sample Output

Suppose you made a backup of your hard disk with dd: dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/disk/backup.img This command enables you to mount a partition from inside this image, so you can access your files directly. Substitute PARTITION=1 with the number of the partition you want to mount (returned from sfdisk -d yourfile.img). Show Sample Output

Based on the execute with timeout command in this site. A more complex script: #!/bin/sh # This script will check the avaliability of a list of NFS mount point, # forcing a remount of those that do not respond in 5 seconds. # # It basically does this: # NFSPATH=/mountpoint TIMEOUT=5; perl -e "alarm $TIMEOUT; exec @ARGV" "test -d $NFSPATH" || (umount -fl $NFSPATH; mount $NFSPATH) # TIMEOUT=5 SCRIPT_NAME=$(basename $0) for i in $@; do echo "Checking $i..." if ! perl -e "alarm $TIMEOUT; exec @ARGV" "test -d $i" > /dev/null 2>&1; then echo "$SCRIPT_NAME: $i is failing with retcode $?."1>&2 echo "$SCRIPT_NAME: Submmiting umount -fl $i" 1>&2 umount -fl $i; echo "$SCRIPT_NAME: Submmiting mount $i" 1>&2 mount $i; fi done

Tested with NTFS and found on this site: http://forensicir.blogspot.com/2008/01/virtualbox-and-forensics-tools.html The first 32256 bytes is the MBR

Copies the complete root-dir of a linux server to another one, where the new harddisks formated and mountet. Very useful to migrate a root-server to another one.

This will cause your machine to INSTANTLY reboot. No un-mounting of drives or anything. Very handy when something has gone horribly wrong with your server in that co-location facility miles away with no remote hands! Suspect this works with all 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernels compiled with magic-syskey-request support.

mounts an ISO file to a directory on the target file system

This is just a proof of concept: A FILE WHICH CAN AUTOMOUNT ITSELF through a SIMPLY ENCODED script. It takes advantage of the OFFSET option of mount, and uses it as a password (see that 9191? just change it to something similar, around 9k). It works fine, mounts, gets modified, updated, and can be moved by just copying it. USAGE: SEE SAMPLE OUTPUT The file is composed of three parts: a) The legible script (about 242 bytes) b) A random text fill to reach the OFFSET size (equals PASSWORD minus 242) c) The actual filesystem Logically, (a)+(b) = PASSWORD, that means OFFSET, and mount uses that option. PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS NOT AN ENCRYPTED FILESYSTEM. To improve it, it can be mounted with a better encryption script and used with encfs or cryptfs. The idea was just to test the concept... with one line :) It applies the original idea of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/7382/command-for-john-cons for encrypting the file. The embedded bash script can be grown, of course, and the offset recalculation goes fine. I have my own version with bash --init-file to startup a bashrc with a well-defined environment, aliases, variables. Show Sample Output

You need bonnie++ package for this. More detail than a simple hdparm -t /dev/sda would give you. the -d is the directory where it performs writes/reads for example I use /tmp/scratch with 777 permissions Bonnie++ benchmarks three things: data read and write speed, number of seeks that can be performed per second, and number of file metadata operations that can be performed per second.

Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.