How to Disable and Enable Laptop Keyboard in Linux

By Eric Z Ma, May 13, 2016

Attaching a USB keyboard to a laptop is common when using a laptop because a normal keyboard may provide a more convenient typing experience. The laptop keyboard is not used in these situations. However, the laptop keyboard may still be touched by accident. In this post, we will discuss how to disable and enable the laptop keyboard in Linux. I will also provide scripts ready for you to directly use them for disabling/enabling the laptop keyboard. » Read more

Turning GNOME terminal to a Pop-up Terminal

By Eric Z Ma, Oct 16, 2015

A pop-up terminal is great and handy on Linux and similar OS. On KDE, Yakuake is great. On Gnome or GTK, I ever tried Guake. It is quite good. However, it has not been as mature, stable and figure-rich as gnome-terminal. One day, I got this idea: why not using a script/program to manage the gnome-terminal and take action upon hotkey hits? » Read more

Script: Shutting Down All Xen VMs on a Server

By Eric Z Ma, Jul 18, 2013

Shutting down servers is a common operations for managing a cluster. However, if this server is configured to a Xen Dom0 and has Xen VMs (DomUs), the VMs should be shutdown first to avoid data lost on these VMs. xm supports a -a option to shutdown all VMs: # xm shutdown -a Add the -w if you want to make it wait for the domain to complete shutdown before returning Thanks to Eugene for this tips. » Read more

Script: Running Commands on a List of Servers

By Eric Z Ma, Sep 6, 2013

I frequently run some commands/scripts on a batch of servers whose IPs are already collected in a file. I usually use a simple loop and call the ssh to run these commands remotely and automatically. This operation, however, is common and can be abstracted into a separate script. Here is the script that I come up with for running commands automatically on a batch of servers: batch-cmd.sh. » Read more