Change Time on a Linux Machine

This is a basic stuff, but if any linux newbies need to know, here is how you can change the time from commandline.

date +%T -s "HH:MM:SS"

orkut birthday alerts

It is always a troublesome job to keep in your mind the birth day of your pals and family and wish them on time. At least, for me, it was. google calendar is what I use for keeping track of events and get alerts on my cell phone so that I wont miss any.  I’d always searched to find a way I can get alerts of birthdays to cell phone by integrating orkut birthdays with g-calendar, followed up the same request from a lot more in google communities, but never found a way to get this done.

Finally google has come up with a solution to this, you can see a link

“view your friends’ birthdays in Google Calendar”

Just below the ‘upcoming birthday’ section in your prifile page. This takes you to the google calender and will have all the orkut birthdays marked in the calender. Now the most important part - getting alerts of google calander events in your cell phone. go to http://www.google.com/calendar >> login using your gmail username/password >> go to settings >> mobile setups. Start by selecting your country and then enter your phone number and carrier. A verification code would be sent to your mobile prior to activating this facility. Finally enter the verification code sent to your phone. They says there can be charges for incoming message ( google doesnt charge you for this service), but I’ve been using this without spending a single buck over a vodafone India connection. Cheers.

What if Matrix ran on Windows ?

Yet another reason to go ubuntu haha :D. this video is awesome!

Reboot command in a VPS

Did you ever try restarting your virtuozzo VPS by hitting the ‘reboot’ command inside the VPS? If you’ve done, you might have had troubles in having it back online automatically. ‘reboot’ command works in a different way inside a VPS unlike a dedicated server. when you issue this command, VPS is stopped and started by a different script in the hardware node which is executed  in every minute.

When you hit reboot command inside the VPS, it invokes reboot system call with argument ‘restart’, which has to be handled by BIOS in normal cases. But since its a VPS, the system call is blocked from within since the VPS shouldnt talk directly with bios, which otherwise can result in a reboot of hardware node! So internelly, the reboot command is being handled this way

1. the VPS is simply stopped when reboot command is issues from within.
2. VPS is started again using a script /etc/sysconfig/vz-scripts/vereboot which is invoked automatically using a cron job specified in  /etc/cron.d/vereboot in ever 1 or 2 minutes depending on the cron

So its a better Idea to go for VZPP to get your virtuozzo VE rebooted rather than issuing a reboot command