Home » 2009 » April

Faces behind Linux — Part #1

What/who you imagine when you hear the names “Ubuntu”, “Debian”, “Slackware”, etc?  Is this tux, penguin, disribution logo? Have you ever wondered who is behind certain Linux distribution? Ian Murdock (left) founded Debian while a student in 1993. He named Debian after himself and his then-girlfriend Debra, now his ex-wife, thus Deb(ra) and Ian. From Ian’s blog: Debian was one of the first Linux distributions and arguably the first open source project that explicity set out to be developed in a decentralized fashion by a … Read more

Home » 2009 » April

Tiny bash scripts: check Internet connection availability

Sometimes it is necessary to check whether server you want to run some big bash script is connected to Internet. Usually it makes sense while running scripts periodically using cron.  Below is the tiny bash script for this purpose: #!/bin/bash WGET=”/usr/bin/wget” $WGET -q –tries=10 –timeout=5 http://www.google.com -O /tmp/index.google &> /dev/null if [ ! -s /tmp/index.google ];then echo “no” else echo “yes” fi As you see it tries to download google’s index page, if it’s not empty script returns “yes”, if there is not Internet connection … Read more