Alphatek - Steven’s Tech Blog

When I migrated from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9, I used the backup function in Evolution. Before backing up my mail accounts (POP3), I deleted all the sent mails and emptied the trash because it was the perfect moment to do so and it would make the backup file a lot smaller. With 5 mails left in Evolution, the backup file was still around 170MB compressed, strange heh?

I had a closer look at my .evolution folder and figured out that there was a huge “cache” directory for each mail account. This folder seems to contain ALL the messages I ever sent/received since the account’s creation.

I can’t see why there should be any cache for POP accounts (seems to be an IMAP feature), and why that cache is still there after emptying the trash…a Google search later, this seems to be a known bug.

I manually deleted the content of the cache folders and everything seems to work fine, no consequence on my inbox content.

So, if you are using Evolution with a POP account and you wonder where your disk space has gone, have a look at this…

After some demands regarding the rsync on NAS200 post, here is a quick howto on how to (huhu) create an rsync server with a Linksys NAS200…feel free to comment this post if something isn’t clear enough. I assume that you know how to compile things under Linux and have all the necessary tools installed.

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Because the price of electricity rose by about 20% in my part of Switzerland during the last months, I was searching for a low-power backup solution for some servers. The Linksys NAS 200 seemed to be the perfect solution: a small box with an open source firmware based on a Linux 2.6.9 kernel. So I ordered one with 2 500GB SATA disks, planning to run it as an rsync server.

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I have seen this link on a forum: http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml

It’s called “Unix Toolbox”; a page listing the most used UNIX commands, classified per category: System, Processes, File System, Network, SSH SCP, VPN with SSH, RSYNC, SUDO, Encrypt Files, Encrypt Partitions, SSL Certificates, CVS, SVN, Useful Commands, Install Software, Convert Media, Printing, Databases, Disk Quota, Shells, Scripting and Programming.

As a sysadmin, I find this handy, and it’s a really nice reminder

If you ever made a cron job, or a script that executes something and produces an output in the console, you are probably familiar with the fact that piping it to /dev/null 2>&1 can silence it

But do you really know what this command is doing, or what the 1 and 2 mean? I found a damn good article on a blog just about that: explain pipes, standard in, standard out and errors to human beings.

It’s on http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2006/06/06/what-does-devnull-21-mean, a must read!