Robin Bowes

I've recently been looking at reporting in OpenNMS  and it seems that some of the reports require date ranges to be specified in unix time . Now, I don't know about you, but my mental ability to translate "April 26, 2011 15:00 UTC" to 1303830000 is sadly lacking. So, here are some useful commands to convert from unix time to date and vice versa: Date to Unix time: # current timestamp date +%s # specific timestamp date -d '2011-04-26 15:00:00' +%s # same thing but UTC date -u +%s date -u -d '2011-04-26 15:00:00' +%s Unix time to date: date -d @1303826400 # same thing but UTC date -u -d @1303826400

I  ran into an odd issue today – my firewall build script was failing on our account master node. It turns out that I was trying to use a chain name in iptables that exceeded the maximum length allowed. I wanted to use "REMOTE_ACCOUNT_SLAV ES_ASHEVILLE" (31 chars) and the limit is 30 chars. You can see this in /usr/include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ip_tables.h and /usr/include/linux/netfilter/x_tables.h : /usr/include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ip_tables.h 22:#define IPT_FUNCTION_MAXNAMELEN XT_FUNCTION_MAXNAMELEN /usr/include/linux/netfilter/x_tables.h 4:#define XT_FUNCTION_MAXNAMELEN 30 This was on CentOS 5.6.

Having grown up with CVS then moved on to svn, I find git amazingly powerful. However, I don't use it enough to learn some of the more powerful features. This is just a post to document a couple of useful things I learned recently. I was working on a project on github, adding a missing command-line option. But, while editing, I got carried away and made a load of additional trivial changes, cleaning up the man page text, making capitalisation consistent, etc. All good stuff, but I didn't want to commit both sets of changes in the same commit. What I needed to do was to select which changes to commit. The command to do that is: git add --patch To show the changes that have been added to the staging area, ie. those that will be commited: git diff --cached If you mistakenly add a change and want to remove it from the staging area: git reset --patch Finally, commit the change: git commit Optionally, push the change back to github: git push origin master Nifty stuff.