We just started supporting Solaris 10 in our VMware cluster so I had to update my zone type script to detect if the OS is running there. I’m not sure how I feel about depending on the output of ptrdiag since the interface is labeled “unstable”, but it works for now, and I really don’t [...]
If you’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and you are now getting UTF 8 conversion errors on your dashboard, you’ll need to take a look at WordPress Trac Ticket #11219.
RSS Error: The data could not be converted to UTF-8
The bottom line is that you’ll need to enable either iconv or mbstring in your PHP configuration. [...]
Every so often us lowly UNIX admins find ourselves needing to search a file system for files that have been created or changed within a certain time window. In other words, those files that are newer than time “X”, but not newer than time “Y”. There are a number of ways to accomplish this, but [...]
Lately I’ve been entertaining myself by building a rebreather loop controller using the Arduino micro controller. This little open source board is really nice to work with for a number of reasons. Unlike many of the alternatives which employ proprietary programming languages, the Arduino simply uses “C”. It also has an IDE that runs the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
