The Geek Stuff

How to Send SMS Using Email to Major US Cellphone Carriers

by Ramesh Natarajan on August 20, 2010

Are you always sending SMS to your friend’s cellphone from your cellphone? Did you know that you can SMS to someone using email?

This list is extremely helpful, if you are outside US and would like to SMS someone in US, you can just send it as an email.
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Can You Make It? Compile C Programs on Linux Using Make Command

by Balakrishnan Mariyappan on August 19, 2010

When you install any software from source, you typically execute commands like — “make”, “make install”, “make clean”, etc. Have you wondered what all these make commands are really making? Sure, we know that it is trying to compile and install the software. But, why make? What does it really do?

For compiling a single C program, cc command is very helpful. For compiling multiple C programs, Make utility is very helpful.

Also, C programmers and sysadmins will find it helpful to automate the compilation related tasks using make utility. In this article, let us review how to use make command.
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UNIX / Linux: 2 Ways to Add Swap Space Using dd, mkswap and swapon

by Ramesh Natarajan on August 18, 2010

Question: I would like to add more swap space to my Linux system. Can you explain with clear examples on how to increase the swap space?

Answer: You can either use a dedicated hard drive partition to add new swap space, or create a swap file on an existing filesystem and use it as swap space.
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10 Things Any Monitoring Software Should Do (Nagios Does it)

by Ramesh Natarajan on August 17, 2010

If you are a system administrator, or IT manager, or someone who is responsible for IT infrastructure, you should implement an enterprise level monitoring solution.

The shell script you’ve written that does a ps -ef and sends you an email might do the basic job, but it doesn’t count as monitoring.

If you want to be proactive, have peace of mind, and sleep well at night, you should implement a robust system and network monitoring solution for your IT infrastructure.
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10 IPCS Command Examples (With IPC Introduction)

by Sasikala on August 12, 2010

IPC stands for Inter-process Communication.

This technique allows the processes to communicate with each another.

Since each process has its own address space and unique user space, how does the process communicate each other?

The answer is Kernel, the heart of the Linux operating system that has access to the whole memory. So we can request the kernel to allocate the space which can be used to communicate between processes.
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UNIX ar Examples: How To Create, View, Extract, Modify C Archive Files (*.a)

by Balakrishnan Mariyappan on August 11, 2010

ar is an archive tool used to combine objects to create an archive file with .a extension, also known as library.

In this article, let us discuss about how to create an user defined static library in C programming using the “ar” utility. The examples shows how to create, extract, and modify the archives using Linux ar command.
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