Here's to 100 years of IBM!

Managing password expiry for a user account (Unix/Linux)

I find this very useful on several occasions so here we go. Login as root and execute the following:
passwd -x -1

So if you want to remove password expiry from bob's account, type:
passwd -x -1 bob

Notice that -1 parameter after -x represents number of days before the password expires. Since we do not want the password to expire, we have set it to -1. However, you can set it to any value you want. So, if you want your password to expire after 90 days (i.e. 3 months) for bob's account, type:
passwd -x 90 bob

Checking memory (RAM) size on Solaris

If you want to check how much RAM your Solaris machine has, here's how:
/usr/sbin/prtdiag -v | grep -i memory

You can also try:
/usr/sbin/prtconf | grep -i memory

Writing Code - Building a chat application in Java - Session 1

Hey Guys! In this series, we will be building a chat application in java. I think this will be a great chance for you all guys out there wanting to do something hands on in Java.

Removing password expiry from your unix machine (Linux and Solaris)

Here's a quick one. If you have a server and you do not want the password for a user to expire (as it can screw some things up while its active), you need to execute the following commands as root:

passwd -x -1

where is the username whose password expiry you wish to remove. For instance, in my case, if username is dm014, I executed:

passwd -x -1 dm014

I have tested this and it works flawlessly on linux and solaris.

Compiling C++ easily on Linux (Easy C++ build system)

I was developing some C++ stuff on my Linux virtual machine and wanted to create something that would make it easy for me to compile C++ code. So I wrote up some bash code and added it into .bashrc as a function. Here's the code:

function cpprun(){
        echo "Checking if output directory exists..."
        if [ ! -d "./output" ]; then
                echo "Creating output directory..."
                mkdir "./output"
                echo "Output directory created."
        elif [ -f "./output/cpprun.o" ]; then
                echo "Backing up previous output..."
                mv ./output/cpprun.o ./output/cpprun.bak.o
                echo "Backup finished."
        fi

        echo "Running g++ compile..."
        g++ -o ./output/cpprun.o *.cpp
        if [ -f "./output/cpprun.o" ]; then
                echo "Compile finished."
                echo "Running output..."
                echo "-----------------"
                ./output/cpprun.o
                echo "-----------------"
                echo "Run finished."
        else
                echo "Compile failed."
        fi
}

Add this to your .bashrc script and then you should be able to compile your C++ code by typing cpprun in the base directory.