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March 2, 2022 – 2:00 pm

Books have been written on the subject of awk and sed. Here’s a small sample of commands I put together over the years that are useful for everyday system administration tasks. Most of these tasks …

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Article Archive for March 2008

Convert MySQL table to CSV file

March 27, 2008 – 4:41 pm
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CSV is a field-separated format that can be easily imported into a spreadsheet application. Usually the separator field is a comma. However, sometimes it is easier to select a more unusual character (like “@” for …

Installing and Configuring Ganglia

March 25, 2008 – 4:19 pm
storage barrels cluster hpc

Ganglia is a distributed performance monitoring application used primarily for tracking status of high-performance compute (HPC) clusters. Ganglia is a royal pain in the ass to install and configure even for a seasoned Unix sysadmin. …

Dealing with ReiserFS bad blocks

March 24, 2008 – 6:42 pm
linux_penguin_0001

The following is a procedure for recovering a ReiserFS filesystem with bad blocks. If this is a system FS and cannot be unmounted, the box needs to be booted from the latest version of Knoppix …

ReiserFS Filesystem Recovery

March 21, 2008 – 3:55 pm
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The this is a description of a method for recovering ReiserFS filesystems from failed disks with bad blocks, when other recovery methods (reiserfsck) will not work. For this example, the failed server is called node1 …

Log Monitoring with Swatch

March 11, 2008 – 1:43 pm
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Swatch is a Perl-based log monitoring tool that can match regular expressions and perform automated actions. The tool is useful for monitoring system log files in real time with an option to run external commands …

Linux User Activity Management

March 9, 2008 – 2:59 pm
sniper soldier

The following is a detailed look into managing Linux users and the system resources they utilize. Disabling user access; halting, killing, and re-nicing user processes; controlling disk space allocation are all points covered by this …