ToraCat's Eye

CentOS Wiki is filled with information and is one of the most frequently used resources available to CentOS users. But, little known is its statistics page:

http://wiki.centos.org/PageHits

According to Ralph, this page is created through a macro called “PageHits” but not all the details as to how this works are known. Anyway, let’s take a look at some of the top entries as of Dec 05, 2008.

This page shows how often a page was requested since the beginning of
logging. It has no intelligence, every view counts as hit.

 1. 732352 FrontPage
 2. 268550 HowTos
 3. 263042 Repositories
 4. 217961 Repositories/RPMForge
 5. 158478 TipsAndTricks
 6. 136617 FAQ
 7. 112780 HowTos/JavaOnCentOS
 8. 105514 FAQ/CentOS5
 9. 104275 HowTos/Xen/InstallingCentOSDomU
10. 102457 Repositories/CentOSPlus
11.  88726 Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.1
12.  77033 Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.0
13.  64338 PackageManagement/Yum
14.  64289 HowTos/Custom Kernel
15.  59413 HowTos/I need the Kernel Source
16.  58947 PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities
17.  57351 Manuals
18.  56419 Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.2
19.  54229 HowTos/FreeNX
20.  49854 HowTos/PackageManagement/YumOnRHEL
21.  48016 FAQ/General
22.  42976 TipsAndTricks/NTFSPartitions
23.  42750 HowTos/Network/IPTables
24.  41817 TipsAndTricks/YumAndRPM
25.  41442 RecentChanges
26.  40885 HowTos/Nagios
27.  40669 GettingHelp
28.  40373 HowTos/Subversion
29.  37791 TipsAndTricks/WindowsShares
30.  30907 TipsAndTricks/Xen
32.  28906 TipsAndTricks/KickStart
33.  28127 FAQ/CentOS4
34.  27719 HowTos/MigrationGuide/ServerCD 4.4 to 5
35.  27660 Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.1/Japanese
36.  26997 TipsAndTricks/VMWare Server
37.  26659 HardwareList


no intelligence … Hmmm, sounds familiar?  Let’s do some analysis. Not so surprisingly, the FrontPage is by far the most often visited page. Also, I knew that the Repositories article was very popular, and that indeed seems to be the case. Things like FAQ or ReleaseNotes are expected to get a lot of hits. What was interesting to me (as a Japanese) was that, among the localized ReleaseNotes, the Japanese version ranked No,1.  This is either because there are so many CentOS users in Japan or the Japanese people do not want to read English (or both).

The kernel-related pages are also well visited despite the fact custome kernels are not supported by the CentOS team.  Alan‘s efforts among others are well paid for.  Ned‘s IPTables is quite popular, too.  Note this page is relatively young compared to others.

My own small contributions, NTFS and WindowsShares, are listed there indiating a good number of CentOS users still stuck with the other OS.

While we are talking about colors …

As you know, thunderbird has gobs of options you can play with. I usually do not care much about how it looks and just use the default settings. The only thing I have done was to change the background color of sub-windows.

Thunderbird in color

This was easily done by editing the userChrome.css file in ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxx/chrome/ .

#folderPaneHeader,
#folderTree treecol,
#folderTree
{background-color: #ccf !important;}

#acctCentralGrid
{background-color: #cfc !important;}

#threadTree treecol,
#threadTree
{background-color: #fcc !important;}

#msgHeaderView,
#attachmentList
{background-color: #cfc !important;}

#folderpane_splitter,
#threadpane-splitter,
#attachment-splitter
{background-color: #00d !important;}


It is rather an old trick – adding a color to your prompt.  But it was resurrected when someone asked a question on a CentOS forum:

“how can I change color of root@localhost inside console????”

After some cheerful exchange, it turned out that this person wanted to know how to color the root’s prompt.  As usual, a nice team work of regular helpers (especially between Alan and Ned) brought about colorful answers.

In fact, making the root’s prompt a colorful one is indeed a good idea.  It reminds you of the root status in a much nicer way than the usual # prompt.  I put in my root’s ~/.bashrc the following:
export PS1="\[\e[31;1m\][\u@\[\e[34;1m\]\H \W]# \[\e[0m\]"
This gives me  [root@apollo ~]# which, in a way, has some American touch.  Hmmm.

This is all good for bash.  However, my own acount uses (t)csh.  Not to worry.  csh supports colors, too.  For example, putting this line in the .login file (one line):
set prompt =
"\[%{\033[32m%}%n@%{\033[34m%}`echo $cwd`%{\033[0m%}\]$ "
produces  [toracat@/home/toracat]$

I also have an alias for “cd” (one line):
alias cd 'cd \!* ; set prompt =
"\[%{\033[32m%}%n@%{\033[34m%}`echo $cwd`%{\033[0m%}\]$ "'
to get a consistent look (csh again).

Why is this good for CentOS? You can see it in the original CentOS thread:

The person who asked the question was so happy with the help he received that he decided to make a donation to CentOS.  What really helped here was the “please donate” message in the Ned‘s signature. 

OpenSSH has built-in support to act as a SOCKS proxy. In my case, there are web sites I can access only from work computers and I need to get to them from home. So, I issue the command from my home computer:

ssh -D 1080 my work IP

However, I do not want to redirect all traffic through work.  Fortunately, you can redirect only selected URLs fairly easily by using a proxy auto-config file.

In firefox, Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings

In the Connection Settings box, select “Automatic proxy configuration URL:” and enter:
file:///path/to/proxylist.pac
The proxylist.pac file may look like this:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
// Proxy direct connections to these hosts
if (
shExpMatch(url, "http://www.jbc.com/*") ||
shExpMatch(url, "*.sgmjournals.org/*") ||
shExpMatch(url, "http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/*")
) {
return "SOCKS localhost:1080; DIRECT";
}
// Otherwise go directly
else return "DIRECT";
}

For more details on the pac file and auto config, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config

If you often need to access files on a remote machine and do it by ssh login, there is a handy way – sshfs. Here is a simplified howto that works.

(1) Set up the rpmforge repository if not done yet (see Installing RPMForge )
(2) Either use the dkms-fuse with the stock RHEL/CentOS kernel or use the centosplus kernel that contains the fuse kernel module. [Note added: fuse is included in the kernel as of RHEL/CentOS 5.4]

[root@mybox ~]# yum install dkms-fuse && modprobe fuse

(3) Also install the fuse libraries:

[root@mybox ~]# yum install fuse

(4) Then install the fuse-ssh filesystem:

[root@mybox ~]# yum install fuse-sshfs

(5) Add yourself to the group ‘fuse’:

[root@mybox ~]# usermod -a -G fuse user1

(6) Re-logon to your account
(7) Create a local directory:

[user1@mybox ~]$ mkdir remotedir/

(8) To mount (remote username=usr2):

[user1@mybox ~]$ sshfs user2@machine.example.com: remotedir/

(9) To unmount:

[user1@mybox ~]$ fusermount -u remotedir