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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 2011

Simple Host Monitoring with SSH

September 23, 2011 – 12:10 am

Sometimes you just need something very simple to monitor a server or an application on a temporary basis. A basic ping monitor is fine, but it will only tell you if a server is responding on the network. It will not tell you if there is some other problem on the system. The script below relies on passwordless SSH setup to periodically log into the monitored nodes and check on their health by executing a local or remote script.

Viewing “man” Pages in a Web Browser

September 16, 2011 – 12:43 am

The Unix “man” pages are an indispensable tool even for the most experienced of sysadmins. Unfortunately, in a terminal window the text may be hard to read and getting a hard copy to take with you down to the datacenter will really test your Unix skills. The following quick script will convert the “man” page of your choice into formatted text and open it in the Web browser.

Autorebooting Servers on Low or High Load

September 14, 2011 – 5:03 pm

Recently I ran into a situation where I needed to reboot several HPC cluster compute nodes. A couple of systems were still running user jobs that I did not want to interrupt. I also didn’t want to sit around and watch those jobs, as there was not way of telling how long they could take to complete. The solution was to write a short script that looks something like this…

Changing Process CPU Affinity on Linux

September 13, 2011 – 4:58 pm

A common real-life scenario: on a multi-CPU system Oracle processed have taken over and the system has ground to a crawl. The average system load is in double-digits and even logging in takes several minutes. The possible root causes for the problem can range from inefficient SQL queries (the common problem) to insufficient system resources. But at this point you just need to make the system a bit more responsive, so you can start troubleshooting.

Adding LUNs to VXVM on Linux

September 6, 2011 – 2:03 pm

The following is a brief overview of the process for adding LUNs to VXVM under Linux. In our example we have an RHEL 5 server with existing LUNs and VXVM volume groups. Two new LUNs with multipathing were allocated from SAN and need to be added to the system to grow one of the volumes and the corresponding filesystem.

Testing RAM in Linux

September 2, 2011 – 11:42 am

A number of good and mostly free tools are available for testing RAM hardware. However, most of these applications are designed to operate in stand-alone mode that requires shutting down the OS. Still, tare a few ways to run memory integrity checks from inside the operating environment. Here we will look at using dd and memtester.