Last night I was creating some manual backups from a server including an entire web sites data files as well as the databases associated with that same web site. I decided to use the tar archiving utility to pack all of the files from the web site into a single file so it could be downloaded and stored easily. Use the information below to exclude a sub directory when creating a tar archive.

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Earlier I was compiling the coreutils application on CentOS Linux and ran into an issue after using the “make” command. At first I was confused because I wasn’t doing anything complex but then I realized that I had simply mistyped an environment variable I had previously set. Below I describe the actual error, what was mistyped, and how I resolved the problem.

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Working on a friends server earlier this morning I noticed that he had logrotate configured but he did not have a configuration file for Postfix. Below is the quick one I whipped up for his environment including a brief explanation of each line of the configuration file below the script. Following the explanation of the various configurations is the command to actually force logrotate to run in debug mode so you can see what happens.

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Dump MySQL database: Use the below mysqldump command syntax to dump a single database from a MySQL

mysqldump -u root -ppassword database_name > database_staging-04-14-2008.sql

Dump One Table from a MySQL DB: The below syntax will dump one MySQL table including the SQL syntax needed to drop that table if it already exists in the database you eventually restore it to.

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