Obviously being a systems administrator it becomes your job to figure out what can go, what needs to stay, et al.

I’ve found that archived logs (logrotate) on a secure server often can be quite large. And on a low-end configuration with a server with only 40G it becomes a nuisance when you have a few Gb of data…
And you all probably know this, but Tim asked when I’d blog. So… I’ll make sure!
Having 40 or 50 files is a pain to manually delete. Sure, you could probably rm -f *.1 *.2 *.3 etc etc etc but that becomes too much of a pain.

On BSD systems there is an awesome counter called ‘jot’; it works exactly the opposite of the GNU command ’seq’; so for a rudimentary example to remove all files it becomes a simple one liner–

• jot 6 1 |while read i; do rm -f *.${i};done
• seq 1 6|while read i; do rm -f *.${i};done

In Emeril fashion: BAM! You’re now out of the clear.

The problem: Both the first time I built this server, and most recently when I rebuilt it to Jaunty Jackalope, the system locales weren’t configured. I understand why this is done, that it happens doesn’t bother me. That I had a hard time finding out how to properly set my locale frustrated me a little bit.

How do you know if your locales aren’t correctly defined? On my Jaunty Jackalope system I see messages like this:

locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default
locale: No such file or directory

I tried running dpkg-reconfigure locales, but that had no effect. Searching the Internet for the messages above provided a couple of possible solutions, but none of them looked like anything I was interested in. I’m a firm believer that if the Internet tells me to run a command with more than a couple of options, that it may work, but there is probably an easier, less cryptic solution. For example:

localedef -v -c -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

No way I’m running that. I instead searched for “slicehost locale” and found this article: Ubuntu Hardy setup. I enjoy this much more:

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
 
update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Turns out that update-locale is a Debian/Ubuntu specific command. It update your systems default locale setting file. I had checked for one before running it and found that none existed yet on my system. After running those two commands above I found one had been created with “LANG=en_US.UTF-8″ in it. It’s possible that running update-locale could have been all I needed to do to begin with.

I hope this helps some one else whose had this problem before or for the first time.