Category: Administration

Everything related to system administration.

How to change priority on Windows scheduled task using Powershell?

By default Windows setups task priority in scheduler to 7 (which is kinda low). The side effect of this is that for eg. backups are taking very long to take. In my case all databases were backed up in about 40-50 minutes…

Continue reading How to change priority on Windows scheduled task using Powershell?

Backup script for PostgreSQL with zip support (Windows)

Simplest solution for backing up PostgreSQL databases. With this bat file you can dump one database to a file and compress it using 7-zip.

PS. If you want a date in your filename simply add %date% var to it’s string.
PS2. Of course check your paths before complaining it does not work 😛

@echo off
:: Global config
SET PG_BIN="C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.6\bin\pg_dump.exe"
SET PG_HOST=localhost
SET PG_PORT=5432
SET PG_PATH="C:\inetpub\temporary_backups"
SET ZIP_BIN="C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe"

:: Database config for 
SET PG_DATABASE=your_database_name
SET PG_USER=your_database_user
SET PGPASSWORD=youe_database_password

SET PG_FILENAME=%PG_PATH%\%PG_DATABASE%_postgres.sql
%PG_BIN% -h %PG_HOST% -p %PG_PORT% -U %PG_USER% %PG_DATABASE% > "%PG_FILENAME%"
%ZIP_BIN% a "%PG_FILENAME:~0,-4%.zip" "%PG_FILENAME%" &DEL "%PG_FILENAME%"

@echo Backup Taken Complete %PG_PATH%%PG_FILENAME%

How to find network device using it’s manufacturer name?

I’ve previously posted a note about finding Raspberry Pi without knowing it’s ip address. Well, basically it’s the same… Only you need to change MAC prefix to find other manufacturer. To wrap this is up, this is a command to find device by MAC prefix:

sudo nmap -sP 192.168.100.0/24 | awk '/^Nmap/{ip=$NF}/00:D0:23/{print ip}'

And here you can find actual MAC information (use CTRL+F).

Of course you need Nmap to do that! And sudo is necessary!

Beware that sometimes there might be many prefixes for one manufacturer. Also check company name precisely, for example HP is Hewlett Packard but it also can be ProCurve Networking by HP.

PHP reading problem with files larger than 2 GB

If you’ll ever have problem with opening (fopen) and reading (fread) files larger than 2 GB in your PHP script. Check your version of scripting engine. In my case switching to 64 bit solved the problem. Please mind that this error is very hard to debug because PHP does not log anything (same as MS IIS) in such case. It simply resets client connection…