Random thoughts

I wanted to edit the crontab on a Solaris 10 box, but when I tried to execute crontab -e, it didn't take me to the vi editor. This is what I got instead: # crontab -e 434 No matter what I typed, I couldn't use this edit mode. Turns out my terminal wasn't exported properly and vi started in 'one line' mode. Here's how to get the default vi back - you need to have the properly variables set in your shell: # EDITOR=vi # export EDITOR # TERMINAL=xterm # export TERMINAL (for bash). Now, try crontab -e again, and vi should be 'full screen'.

Recently I experienced very long delays while connecting to remote mysql databases, without any apparent reason. The connect would stall while connecting, before issuing querries and would wait for about 15-20 seconds before working. I managed to find out why: The mysqld server uses reverse DNS queries to find out the name of the calling host. If the DNS is unavailable at the server side (as was my case), it takes a while for the query to time out. To solve this, you must add your ip and hostname in the /etc/hosts of your mysql server, so it is able to resolve your IP (or get the DNS working). More info here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/dns.html

This post is just for testing purposes. I'm new to this 'blogging' thing!