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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 February 2011

Force NTP Time Update on Linux

February 21, 2011 – 8:36 pm
time clock watch

Imagine this: you created the /etc/ntp.conf file, enabled and started the ntpd service, and… the system time is still off. Is there a way to force time sync with the NTP server? It must be your lucky day. All you have to do is to connect to your box as root and run the following command…

Don’t Be Afraid to Reboot Unix Servers

February 21, 2011 – 8:11 pm
hacker

Reboot your Unix servers after making any major changes to the production environment. Should an unexpected problem come up, it will be easier to deal with it when everything is still fresh in your mind and not six months down the road, when you have to do a reboot to replace a failed system board and suddenly discover that some application wouldn’t load, by which time you forgot all about this application and have to start with the first page of the admin guide.

Fixing Your Crappy Cell Phone Photos

February 10, 2011 – 10:11 pm
photo002

Some of today’s cell phones feature camera resolution that rivals digital SLRs from two year ago. An 8-megapixel cell phone camera is no longer a novelty. Unfortunately, high resolution is the only good thing cell phone cameras have to offer and it does not translate into better pictures. If you compare photos taken with the most advanced cell phone camera to those taken with a $200 point-and-shoot digital camera, the cell phone invariably loses.

Find Command with Multiple Exec Statements

February 10, 2011 – 12:32 am
shell_001

This is a very simple one, but somehow I always forget the correct syntax. I want to use the “find” command to locate files and then use several “exec” statements to perform various operations on whatever “find” finds. In the following example I am making sure that all /etc/*.conf files are owned by root and that they don’t have permissions greater than 644.