I managed to corrupt my NetInfo database on an OS 10.4 server a few weeks ago by not cleanly unmounting the drive after booting from DVD and resetting the admin password. Long story short, this left me with no users on the system at all. With no users, I could not log in to create [...]
For some reason that is a complete mystery to me, RHEL does not give you the link status when you run # ifconfig -a. This makes it incredibly hard to debug link integrity issues! Buried amongst all of Red Hat’s proprietary commands, however, is a utility called ethtool, which does give you the status of [...]
When many new servers are delivered from the factory, the system clock is way off. Most UNIX systems run “ntpd” to keep the time in sync with internet time servers, which are, in turn synchronized against an atomic clock. This results in a system time that is very very close to the “actual” time of [...]
Many system 5 UNIX variants use scripts in the /etc/rcN.d/ directories to control which services should be started in the various runlevels. If, for instance, you wanted the secure shell daemon to run in runlevel 4, you would put a script named something like “S55sshd” in “/etc/rc4.d”. This script would usually accept the “start” “stop” [...]
It occurs to me that when you work in IT, you can easily tell how how nice the person you are working with is by the extent to which he is pleasant to you when things are not going well.
All too often people act as nice as can be when they want something, but as [...]
If you’re familiar with UNIX, you know that changing mount points is really pretty easy. All you have to do is go into “/etc/fstab”, “/etc/vfstab” (or whatever your flavor of UNIX happens to call its filesystem table) and change the mount directory.
If, for instance, you had a Solaris box, and you wanted to make the [...]
So you’ve got Oracle 10G and you want to install it on your RedHat Enterprise 3 server. Well, since Oracle can’t manage to create tar files like everyone else in the world, you have to find a way of dealing with the .cpio they send you. Here’s how to get it extracted:
cpio -idmv < /path/to/ship-version.cpio
This [...]
