OK, so I never actually believed that they were a mythical creature, but it took me so long to actually find one after moving to Santa Cruz that I had great fun telling those who didn’t know better that they were figment of the collective local imagination. Courtney, who had seen them before, always sighed, [...]
There are a lot of usefully MySQL commands that I either don’t run enough to remember or just end up using some GUI to accomplish. Nothing against Navicat, but what kind of sysadmin would I be if I couldn’t do it at the command line as well. Anyhow, I had to do a bunch of [...]
She may not the the world’s angriest woman, but the first lady in this video may very well be the biggest airhead! The rest of the characters are pretty good too. It turns out that you don’t have to live in Santa Cruz very long before you start running into these folks. What can I [...]
We use a lot of local zones in our Solaris 10 environment. We also use cfengine pretty heavily and there are some instances when we need to include or exclude certain automated tasks based on what type of zone we are working with. I wrote this little script that checks to see what type of [...]
In the past, I always had to use the ndd – get command to figure out what my link speed and duplex settings were. In Solaris 10, Sun now gives us the handy dladm command, which makes it a whole lot easier.
# dladm show-dev
e1000g2 link: up [...]
So you have used SVM to mirror your disk, and one of the two drives fails. Aren’t you glad you mirrored them! You don’t have to do a restore from tape, but you are going have to replace the failed drive.
Many modern RAID arrays just require you to take out the bad drive and plug [...]
Today, Friday February 13, at 3:31 PM (PST), the UNIX time will read exactly 1234567890. So exacly what is all this excitement about UNIX being able to count to 10? Surely, the operating system that is slowly but steadily putting Microsoft out of business must be able to do that. Well, it’s actually the UNIX [...]
It’s always a good idea to setup a local firewall on hosts that are on unprotected networks. The internet “winds” blow harder and harder each day, and it’s only a matter of time before some daemon has an exploit that gets taken advantage of. I use CentOS 5 for all my web servers, and here [...]
Unless you specify a different administrative file, the pkgadd command reads “/var/sadm/install/admin/default”, which specifies the base directory as “/opt”. Do not change the settings in this file, but rather create a custom admin file and enter an alternate “basedir” directive if you want to install your package into a different directory. We are going to [...]
Ever since coming to work at UC Santa Cruz, I have been feeling pretty lucky to work in a well engineered and managed datacenter. So lucky, in fact, that I’ve been cultivating hatred towards me in my former coworkers by regaling them with stories about how wonderfully designed everything is here. The problem with thinking [...]
Well, after five years living in Vermont, and something like thirteen years living in New England, Courtney and I have gone and moved to Santa Cruz, CA. There are a lot of reasons for this; the very hard winters and extremely rainy summers in Vermont were starting to wear on us, but mostly we just [...]
Several weeks ago we started seeing some pretty scary errors showing up on the main system disk for our Blackboard server. We had an extra server hanging around, so we decided to move all the data off the failing disk and onto our spare server. The only question was how to make the new server [...]
Casey needed me to install APC cache for the Scriblio project. It’s a PECL module, and pecl install apc gives an error. Here are some great instructions for getting it all to work.
UPDATE: Casey actually has some instructions that provide a more elegant method of installing APC on CentOS or RHEL. Both methods will work, [...]
We backup our Oracle databases using RMAN and then write the backup pieces out to an NFS share. This has always worked well, but RMAN started complaining that the NFS share was not mounted with the correct options when we upgraded to Oracle 10G. After some poking around in the docs I finally came up [...]
Creating a properly offset slab of disk for Linux systems on your CLARiiON is not just a matter of creating a partition using the default fdisk values. The reason for this is that disk management utilities for Intel based systems generally write 63 sectors of metadata directly at the beginning of the LUN. The addressable [...]
