Updating Thinkpad Firmware with Linux

Lenovo packages its UEFI firmware updater as either a Windows installable package or a bootable CD image. The bootable image is great for those running Linux on their systems. However, if you do not have an external CD drive or do not want to burn a CD, the update process takes a few more steps. Fortunately, the updater can be extracted from the CD image and written to a USB drive with Linux.

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Enable NVIDIA modules in EC2 GPU Instances without Rebooting

Recently, I needed to use GPU instances with a custom AMI1 on EC2. The image I needed to use did not contain the necessary NVIDIA and CUDA2 modules and instead contained nouveau. This posed a unique situation because normally a reboot is necessary after installing the official module. However, the software I was provisioning the instances with was unable to resume after rebooting. Using this short script I was able to swap the opensource nouveau module for the NVIDIA module without rebooting the instance.

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Bulk Delete Messages from Postfix Queue

Have you have ever had a script or application accidentally send thousands of messages through your postfix queue? With this simple tip you no longer need to wait for those messages to be processed through the Postfix queue. This one liner is also helpful if you have a lot of differed messages in the Postfix queue you would like to discard. You can simply use standard linux tools to awk through your Postfix queue and drop those unwanted messages.

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Quickly Transfer Files Between Servers

When transferring files between systems usually rsync or scp are all that is needed. Sometimes, there are difficult edge cases. For example using rsync to transfer many files spread across 1000s of directories quickly. Recently, I needed to move several TB worth of files in varying size spread across 1000s of directories. I found that rsync spent most of the time traversing directories and not copying the data. I turned to the webs to find a better solution.

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Helpful Screen Tips

Screen is a great command to know when working on linux and unix systems. Screen allows long commands to stay running if you become disconnected from a server or if you want to disconnect. Screen may not be installed by default depending on what distribution you are using. In order to use it you will need to install it on the system you are working on. The installation process is usually pretty simple.

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