Tag Archives: unix

Converting UTF-16 to ASCII Format Text Files

For those dealing with Windows applications, sometimes the app writes logs with UTF-16 character encoding.  This is the case with Titan-FTP (commercial) software that writes the logs in that format.  Using cygwin or Linux grep command to search through the file will not return any result!  When using vi to examine the file, the escape characters doesn’t show up. The dos2unix command will not strip them, neither.

Fortunately, there is an easy way out. The utility iconv will help convert the file to make it searchable (read: Useful) again.

iconv -c -f utf-16 -t ascii file.log > newfile.log


Listing Memory Usage by Process

Solaris OS LogoA question asked to me often, “Which processes are using up too much memory?”  I generally use top to figure them out manually.  But there’s a better way to do it, using Solaris pmap command.  I can get a good estimate on the memory usage.  Brandon Hutchinson has a shell script that provides a nice output.  I modified it a little bit to include a column for process owner.

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/printf "%-6s %-9s %-13s %s\n" "PID" "Total" "User" "Command"
/usr/bin/printf "%-6s %-9s %-13s %s\n" "---" "-----" "----" "-------"
for PID in `/usr/bin/ps -ef  | /usr/bin/awk '$2 ~ /[0-9]+/ { print $2 }'`
do
   USER=`/usr/bin/ps -o user -p $PID | /usr/bin/tail -1`
   CMD=`/usr/bin/ps -o comm -p $PID | /usr/bin/tail -1`
   # Avoid "pmap: cannot examine 0: system process"-type errors
   # by redirecting STDERR to /dev/null
   TOTAL=`/usr/bin/pmap $PID 2>/dev/null | /usr/bin/tail -1 | \
   /usr/bin/awk '{ print $2 }'`
   [ -n "$TOTAL" ] && /usr/bin/printf "%-6s %-9s %-13s %s\n" "$PID" "$TOTAL" "$USER" "$CMD"
done | /usr/bin/sort -rn -k2

Note, this script needs to run as “root” for pmap to have permission to examine each process.

Output looks something like this:

PID    Total     User      Command
---    -----     ----      -------
694    25240K    root      /opt/RICHPse/bin/se.sparcv9.5.9
696    5208K     root      /usr/dt/bin/dtlogin
613    4992K     root      /opt/CA/BABcmagt/caagentd
326    4512K     smmsp      /usr/lib/sendmail
260    4440K     root      /usr/sbin/syslogd
269    2440K     root      /usr/sbin/cron
196    2360K     root      /usr/sbin/keyserv
193    2352K     root      /usr/sbin/rpcbind
103    2336K     root      /usr/lib/sysevent/syseventd
235    2224K     root      /usr/lib/nfs/lockd
206    2184K     root      /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypbind

Samba and Windows 7

Windows 7 has upgraded security.  This will effectively cause trouble in making connections to legacy apps (ie. Windows XP supported).  One of them is Samba on Unix.

Fortunately, there’s a solution to this:

  1. Open Control Panel.
  2. Choose Administrative Tools.
  3. Click Local Security Policy.
  4. Under Local Policies and Security Options:
    1. Change Network security: LAN Manager Authentication Level to “Send LM & NTLM responses”
    2. Change Minimum Session Security for NTLM SSP to disable “Require 128-bit encryption” into “No Minimum Security”.

Illustrations below: