Event Log »
Parallella: The $99 Linux supercomputer
Chip-company Adapteva announced on April 15th at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California, that they’ve built their first Parallella parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputing, and that they’ll be sending them to their 6,300 …
Xen becomes a Linux Foundation project
San Francisco, CA: In a surprising move, the Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to Linux, announced on April 15th at the Linux Collaboration Summit that the Xen Project, the open-source hypervisor, is becoming a …
So you want to be a Unix sysadmin?
April 07, 2013, 10:41 PM — Thinking about becoming a Unix systems administrator?
The good, the bad, and the challenging
After several decades of administering Unix systems, I know more than I’d like to admit about …
Ubuntu 13.04 goes beta
It took a while, but the second, and final, beta of the next version of Canonical‘s Ubuntu Linux distribution, 13.04, aka Raring Ringtail, has been released.
Ubuntu 13.04 is only weeks away from release, but you can …
Why Windows fragmentation will blow Windows to smithereens (cough)
The Windows operating system has been plagued with fragmentation ever since the 3.x branch of the OS was released on multiple PCs. (Ahem)
Android fragmentation will blow up Android just as much as Windows fragmentation has …
Networking »
Fixing the mount.nfs: rpc.statd is not running Error
The rpc.statd service is used by NFS client to help it recover from loss of connectivity to the NFS server. When rpc.statd is not running, NFS is not able to handle remote file locking. You …
Red Hat: Changing Hostname and IP
Changing hostname and IP is frequently required when a server is being moved from testing or development to production. The process is a fairly simple one, but steps must be performed in a certain order to avoid complications.
Applications »
Install Pflogsumm PostFix Log Summarizer
Pflogsumm is yet another log analyzer/summarizer for Postfix. It is written in Perl and has been around for a while. Very simple to install, so I writing this post mostly as a note to myself. …
Installing Sendmail Analyzer on RHEL/CentOS
The Sendmail Analyzer can be useful for visualizing your Sendmail/Postfix log. The commands below can be copy-pasted as root on default installations of RHEL and CentOS 5/6 with default Postfix and httpd. If your configuration …
Data »
Filesystem Performance Testing Using dd
Below is a simple script to test filesystem read/write performance using dd with varying blocksize parameter. This can be useful for testing local filesystems as well as network-mounted filesystems. The end result will be a …
Quick BTRFS Test on OpenSuse 12.2
The recent announcement from Suse Enterprise Linux that Btrfs was production-ready raised some suspicions. The last time I tested btrfs (not very long ago) the primary issues were excessive CPU utilization and filesystem space that seemed to disappear into nowhere. So, as a quick test, I put together an OpenSuse 12.2 (3.4.6-2.10-desktop, OpenSuse 12.2) 64-bit VM (ESX) with one dual-core vCPUs, 4GB RAM, the OS disk and a 6GB striped LVM filesystem consisting of 4 4-GB virtual disks.
Monitoring »
openlava Quick Test
After years working with PBS and LSF, ran into Jeff Layton’s “Share the Load” review of openlava resource manager in the Feb 2013 issue of the Admin Magazine and nostalgia took over. So I built …
Filesystem Performance Testing Using dd
Below is a simple script to test filesystem read/write performance using dd with varying blocksize parameter. This can be useful for testing local filesystems as well as network-mounted filesystems. The end result will be a …
Commands & Shells »
Bash scripting: lists and random things
Imagine you have an HPC cluster with a hundred compute nodes named node001-node100. The two commands below will help you generate a list of node names – either all name on one line or one name per …
Fast IP Range Scanner in Bash
Just a simple script to scan an IP range and do a reverse DNS lookup. This can be useful for building an inventory of systems on your LAN. Just make sure to give your network …
Editor
Igor
Sr. Unix SysAdmin with fifteen years experience supporting Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, and Linux servers in a large distributed environment.
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