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 September 2010

Recently I ran into an issue: the sshd service on a Solaris 10 box needed to be used with a custom configuration file. By default, the sshd service will use /etc/ssh/sshd_config. I needed it to use /etc/ssh/sshd_config_custom. I could not just modify the default configuration file. Don’t ask why – it’s complicated. So here’s what I ended up doing and this process is applicable to modifying any other Solaris 10 (and above) service.

Substitute Commands Depending on User ID

September 9, 2010 – 2:44 pm

Here is a quick example of how to substitute system commands based on who tries to run them. A customer of mine has recently deployed a security audit application on his servers. The application has a few bugs that the vendor has not yet resolved. For example, the security audit agent looks at the output of the “mount” command to see if any filesystems are mounted without the “nosuid” option.

iPhone 3GS OS4 Upgrade

September 4, 2010 – 5:23 pm

iTunes for Windows must be one of the buggiest, most poorly written applications out there. In terms of wasted months of your life it definitely ranks up there with Lotus Notes and Media Player 12. I don’t know how well iTunes works on a Mac (I like computer mice with twenty buttons, so I never was a big Mac fan), but I think I read somewhere that iTunes for Windows is the leading cause of suicides among iPhone owners.