Skipping characters whilst using nano over SSH from OS X Lion 10.7

Ever since upgrading to OSX Lion 10.7 I’ve been pulling my hair out. I spend a fair bit of time connected via SSH to remote servers using Terminal, ever since the upgrade when using Nano on a remote server I would get skipped characters and all sorts of wacky behaviour.

There is a fix!

Sneakily Apple changed the default way in which Terminal presents itself to remote servers, but you can go back!

Open Terminal and go to the Preferences (CMD+,) Hit Advanced and under emulation change “Declare terminal as” to xterm-color instead of xterm256-color.

Job Done

1and1 Dynamic Cloud Server Disk Allocation

I have a Dynamic Cloud Server with 1 and 1 which should have 100GB of disk space. Imagine my surprise when after a few days I was getting alerts telling me that I was already out of space!

Checking the server it turned out that I only had 4GB assigned to /var!!!!

A quick call to 1 and 1 revealed why. Although I did have 100GB available to me the retards at 1 and 1 decided that us server owners should work out ourselves how to use LVM to increase our partitions from the devices ourselves! NO WARNING, NO NOTES NO NOTHING!

So after speaking to a server tech (who agreed that it was bloody stupid that customers weren’t warned about this) I was pointed to a useful FAQ that helped me increase my partition sizes.

It is also worth noting that if you increase your available disk space form the cloud server menu you need to follow a seperate FAQ to get your server to use it!

How can I increase a Logical Volume
How do I assign additional disk space on a Linux DCS?

If you goto faq.1and1.co.uk and search for LVM these articles come up.

Mazda MX5 SportTech Roadster

I couldn’t resist the temptation. Only 12 months after purchasing my Punto Sport (see here) I have turned to the dark side, traded it in for a new Mazda MX5 Roadster, this is the hardtop Convertible, 2l petrol, 160Bhp lovely rear wheel drive beauty!

I pick it up Friday and then will jumping straight in and breaking it in with a nice trip down to Cornwall for the bank holiday!

Create SSH Keys from your Mac

I spend a lot of time in Terminal connected to remote servers via SSH, I’m by no means an expert and have come across using Key pairs in the past, but never really used them. Until now. It’s really easy to get going signing into servers via SSH just using your local Key. In my case I use a Macbook Pro/Air and a CentOS 5.6 Server, but the fundamentals should be the same for most *Nix platforms.

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