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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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Unix and Linux network configuration. Multiple network interfaces. Bridged NICs. High-availability network configurations.

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Reviews of latest Unix and Linux software. Helpful tips for application support admins. Automating application support.

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Disk partitioning, filesystems, directories, and files. Volume management, logical volumes, HA filesystems. Backups and disaster recovery.

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Commands & Shells

Cool Unix shell commands and options. Command-line tools and application. Things every Unix sysadmin needs to know.

Wget examples and scripts

November 27, 2005 – 3:19 pm
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Wget is a command-line Web browser for Unix and Windows. Wget can download Web pages and files; it can submit form data and follow links; it can mirror entire Web sites and make local copies. …

Uninstalling Solaris 10 from a multi-boot system

November 27, 2005 – 2:39 am
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Boot into one of the operating systems you would like to keep (i.e. Windows, Linux, etc.) and set its partition as “Active”. Reboot your system. If the system boots into the OS of your choice …

Basic Network Configuration Under Solaris

November 26, 2005 – 1:27 pm
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The following document provides a general overview of the network configuration process for Solaris. For a detailed review of Solaris network configuration please see Chapter 4 of the O’Reilly Solaris 8 Administration Guide by Paul …

Multi-booting Windows XP and Solaris 10

November 25, 2005 – 5:09 pm
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When creating a multiboot system with Windows XP and Solaris 10 you need to install Windows XP first. If Windows is already installed, repartition the hard drive to allocate sufficient space for your Solaris installation. …

Create boot block on Solaris disk

November 22, 2005 – 11:29 pm
HP-Greets-IBM-2

To make a Solaris disk bootable you need to install the boot block on the disk. This should be done, for example, after copying the primary boot disk to the secondary disk.

Basic Exceed configuration

November 22, 2005 – 11:22 pm
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The following is a list of steps for basic configuration of Exceed to connect to Unix servers.

Solaris boot disk copy using dd

November 22, 2005 – 6:40 pm
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The following Korn shell script will make a bootable copy of the boot disk on a Solaris system. The script uses dd and requires that the source disk and destination disk have the same geometry.

Command-line backup methods

November 22, 2005 – 6:01 pm
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The following is a brief overview of standard Unix comman-line utilities used for data backup on Solaris systems. Most of the information below is also applicable to other unixoid systems.

Working with ISO images on Solaris

November 22, 2005 – 4:57 pm
HP-Greets-IBM-2

The following two commands will take all data in /home/neal, copy it to the ISO file, and burn the ISO file to a recordable CD.

Executing commands with ‘find’

November 21, 2005 – 11:47 pm
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To executes commands with ‘find’ use the ‘-exec’ option. Example:

NetBackup statistics, Part II

November 21, 2005 – 5:04 pm
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This script uses the output of the script in the previous example to calculate yearly backup load for each Veritas NetBackup client.

NetBackup statistics, Part I

November 21, 2005 – 4:59 pm
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The following script will calculate total size of data backups for each Veritas NetBackup client over the past week (or as defined by the “daysago” variable in the script). The final output will be uploaded …

Using rsync to copy files

November 21, 2005 – 4:00 pm
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In the following example we need to make sure that /export/home on server host2 looks exactly like /export/home on host1. Thus, our SOURCE is host1:/export/home and our TARGET is host2:/export/home
There are two ways of using …

If Exceed host window does not come up

November 21, 2005 – 11:30 am
ethernet cables

If Exceed host selection window doesn’t come up or disappears after a few seconds, check the servers in the xdmcp.txt file for Exceed for a dead xdm process. Restart xdm by running /etc/rc3.d/S90xdm stop and …

Install PHP, Mysql, Apache2 on Solaris 9

November 21, 2005 – 11:05 am
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A sample procedure for installing PHP, MySQL and Apache2 on Solaris 9.

Apache MySQL PHP Solaris 8 Installation

November 21, 2005 – 11:03 am
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A sample procedure for installing PHP, MySQL and Apache2 on Solaris 8.

vx command to show vmsa processes running:

November 21, 2005 – 11:00 am

vx command to show vmsa commandline processes running:

Using GNUPlot to chart MySQL data

November 20, 2005 – 12:17 pm
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The following Korn shell function connects to a MySQL database and extracts specified data, which is then plotted as a function of time using GNUPlot.  Using correct syntax is critical. Note the use of single- …

Database operations with SQL and Korn shell

November 20, 2005 – 11:46 am
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The following Korn shell function will read the a directory containing CSV data files named server_sysstat.20051119.csv with format:

Solaris boot disk copy

November 20, 2005 – 2:24 am
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A sample procedure for installing PHP, MySQL and Apache2 on Solaris 8.

FTP script with nested function

November 20, 2005 – 2:14 am
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An example of an FTP script with Korn shell.

Resetting Root Password under Solaris

November 20, 2005 – 2:02 am
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The following document explains how to change an unknown root password on a Solaris system. Use this only for disaster recovery purposes. Please be sure to read the Notes section below if you run into …