Author: Martin

Script To Clear Event Logs

Awesome script to clear all of your Windows 7 event logs. Wish I remembered where I sourced it from to give them credit.


@echo off
FOR /F "tokens=1,2*" %%V IN ('bcdedit') DO SET adminTest=%%V
IF (%adminTest%)==(Access) goto noAdmin
for /F "tokens=*" %%G in ('wevtutil.exe el') DO (call :do_clear "%%G")
echo.
echo Event Logs have been cleared! ^ goto theEnd
:do_clear
echo clearing %1
wevtutil.exe cl %1
goto :eof
:noAdmin
echo You must run this script as an Administrator!
echo ^ :theEnd
pause>NUL

TextPad and Excel Slow To Open Files

I recently discovered an issue on my Windows 7 x64 system where double clicking text files (associated with TextPad) and Excel files (associated with Excel) took over 30 seconds to open the file.

A few forums on the Web suggested that the problem was that a program on my system may be blocking DDE messaging. In my case it turned out that Acronis TrueImage 2012 was the issue.

After uninstalling this bad boy I found that my file open timings returned to normal.

HowTo: Boot Your Mac Into 64-bit Mode

For those of you that are running the new version of MacOS – Snow Leopard, it may come as a surprise that by default, the kernal boots into 32-bit mode. However, you can change the OS to boot the kernal into 64-bit mode by running the following:

1. Run:

ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | awk -F'"' '/firmware-abi/{print $4}'

and make sure it returns EFI64

2. If the above command returns EFI64 then edit the following file:

sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

and replace the contents with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=x86_64</string>
</dict>
</plist>

3. Save and reboot

Citation

HowTo: Change Account Order in Thunderbird

To change the order of the accounts in Thunderbird:

  1. Shutdown Thunderbird
  2. Edit ~/.thunderbird//prefs.js in GNU/Linux, C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\****.default\prefs.js in Microsoft Windows XP, and C:\Users\\App Data\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\****.default\prefs.js in Microsoft Windows Vista and 7.
  3. Edit those the following 2 lines to change the order of the accounts. The default account is always first one.

user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "account5,account3,account2");
user_pref("mail.accountmanager.defaultaccount", "account5");

Xbox 360 – HDMI Audio Problems

I had an issue the first time I turned on my new Xbox 360 where I was unable to get audio working via HDMI. After many hours of experimentation I discovered that if you go into the Display settings there is an option called “Display Discovery” which is turned on by default. If you’re running your Xbox through an Audio Receiver or similar device it appears that the auto discovery mechanism built in to the Xbox occasionally results in Xbox being set to “DVI Mode” i.e. video only.

The way to resolve this problem is to just turn”Display Discovery” off and restart the Xbox.

CPU Monitoring Script

Have you ever had a rogue process chew up all the CPU on your Linux server for a days and nobody notice?

This happens to me quite a lot so I decided to write a bash script that looks for these processes and send an alert email.

#!/bin/bash

#
# cpumon - monitors CPU usage and sends an alert email if limit is exceeded
#
# 2009 - martin [at] teamburns [dot] com
#

host=`hostname`
file="/tmp/cpumon.txt"

rm $file > /dev/null 2>&1

function sendEmail() {
   subject="High CPU on $host"
   /usr/bin/mail -s "$subject" user@domain.com < $file
}

while read a b c
do
   pid="$a"
   cmd="$b"
   cpu_percentage="$c"

   if [[ -z "$cpu_percentage" ]]
   then
      echo "process $pid $cmd is using less than zero percent of the cpu!"
      continue
   else
      cpu_percentage_integer=$(echo "$cpu_percentage"|sed 's/^\([^\.]*\)\..*$/\1/')
   fi

   if [[ $cpu_percentage_integer -gt 10 ]]
   then
      echo "$pid $cmd is using $cpu_percentage_integer percent of our CPU" >> $file
   fi
done <<< "`ps --no-heading -eo pid,comm,pcpu`"

if [[ -f $file ]]
then
   sendEmail
fi

This script can be scheduled to run periodically by placing an entry in the crontab file. Make sure use replace username with a valid name:

*/30 *  * * *   username    /home/username/cpumon >/dev/null 2>&1