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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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Networking

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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Distributed server monitoring. Server performance and capacity planning. Monitoring applications, network status and user activity.

Commands & Shells

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

Bounce Veritas HA Cluster resource

December 7, 2005 – 11:01 am
boot

The following is a Korn shell script that can be used from command line or cron to bounce a Veritas HA Cluster resource. This can be useful to resolve certain problems with Oracle databases running …

Cygwin X-server configuration

December 6, 2005 – 12:12 am
network_cable_01

To connect with Cygwin to a Unix X-server in XDMCP-broadcast mode, create a shortcut as shown below. In the target field enter:

Running Windows Apps on Linux

December 5, 2005 – 11:43 pm
windows-logo-readerszone

CrossOver is a commercial variation of Wine freeware – a Windows emulator for Linux. This program allows you to run popular Windows applications under x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Wine and CrossOver can …

Configuring multi-IP network interfaces

December 2, 2005 – 12:18 pm
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This article explains how to configure a network interface to support virtual IP addresses. This is useful in a cluster environment or in any high-availability service cnfiguration, when you need to ensure that at least …

Handling errors and trapping system calls

December 2, 2005 – 11:20 am
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In the course of writing a shell script it is important to consider possible error and unexpected interrupts. Let’s say you wrote an interactive script that allows users to archive old files to free up …

Passing shell variables to awk and sed

December 2, 2005 – 10:23 am
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By default awk and sed do not expand shell or system variables and do not pass their own variables back to the shell. To use shell variables awk and sed statements must be included in …

Solaris performance monitoring

November 28, 2005 – 4:47 pm
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The following is a brief overview of common performance monitoring tools for Solaris, including built-in tools, freeware add-ons, and commercial applications.
Souce: http://www.sunperf.com/perfmontools.html
Built-in Tools
vmstat
The vm in vmstat stands for Virtual Memory, of course. So let us …

Wget examples and scripts

November 27, 2005 – 3:19 pm
dump truck

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
sun_solaris_0001

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
HP-Greets-IBM-2

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
sun_solaris_0001

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
hard-disk_00416535

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
apache

A sample procedure for installing PHP, MySQL and Apache2 on Solaris 9.