Awk & sed Snippets for SysAdmins

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 January 2010

Until I branched out a few years ago from supporting Unix server to working with Linux clusters, I never really encountered this issue: you type “reboot”, “init 0”, or “shutdown” as root and… nothing happens. Or the system starts going down but then hangs on unmounting a filesystem or unloading a module. I think this happened once to a colleague of mine who was rebooting a Solaris server, but this is a common problem with Linux.

Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7

January 27, 2010 – 10:45 pm

Recently I upgraded a client’s Vista computer (Toshiba Qosmio, 4Gb, Intel Core Duo P7350, 7200-RPM 200-Gb disk) from Vista Ultimate 64-bit to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Being a Unix sysadmin this is not something I usually do. How did the experience compare to upgrading HP-UX, Solaris or SLES? In a nutshell: I’d rather walk around all day in wet underwear than attempt to upgrade Vista ever again.

Windows Network Troubleshooting Script

January 20, 2010 – 10:15 pm

I try my best to stay away from Windows. I wish my clients did the same. The usual difficulty of troubleshooting elusive network performance problems is amplified many-fold when there is a Windows computer at the end of the line. With Unix it’s relatively simple: run tests “a”, “b”, “c”, etc and follow the familiar process of elimination. With Windows in the picture the number of steps uses up all of the English alphabet and spills over well into the Russian one. And when you finally reach step “я”, you have to pull out your Chinese dictionary.