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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I started getting this error:
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication
when trying to forward X11 applications from a Linux server to my Mac. I had been forwarding the display on this server for years, so I was a little unsure what could be causing it. In the end, it turned out that I had filled [...]
I needed to replace a string in several thousand files scattered all over the filesystem on one of our servers. I used find to create a list of files that needed to be changed, along with their complete path and called it "list.txt". It looked something like this:
/path/to/file/one/fileone.html
/path/to/file/two/filetwo.php
/path/to/file/three/filethree.htm
/path/to/directory with spaces/filefour.txt
and so on...
I worked out the [...]
I've just finished upgrading my Mac Mini to OSX 10.5, and I have to say, the upgrade could not be simpler. While it did take slightly over an hour to complete, there were fewer than 10 clicks throughout the entire upgrade process, so I can't imagine how anyone could mung it up. The one detail [...]
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 [...]
George Hotz, along with a team of hackers have come up with a method to break the chains binding the iPhone to AT&T, allowing it to be used with any carrier. The complete method can be found here on George's blog. It does take some soldering skills and a bit of familiarity with UNIX and [...]
Unlike other flavors of UNIX, RHEL does not have a command like adduser which walks you through the process step-by-step, so you have to remember the four flags useradd requires, and in what order it expects to receive them. Since I don't manually add users unless I'm installing a new server, I don't run the [...]
From time to time, people want me to create LINUX init scripts for them. I usually just take an existing one for another service and change it up to work for my new application, but most of them have become so long these days that I end up having to hack out a ton of [...]
I'm always forgetting the syntax to make "for" loops in Bash. I guess it serves me right for using foreach most of my UNIX life instead. Anyhow, I know I will have to come back here to find it, so I thought I would write put up this quick example with the hope that it [...]
There are a number of applications running on our servers that have GUI's that I need to display on the Mac in my office. While the traditional method of exporting the server-side display to my desktop works, it is inherently insecure because the entire session, including any passwords that may be sent are all transmitted [...]
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 [...]
OpenGroupWare is an open source groupware package intended as an alternative to proprietary applications such as Exchange and PostPath. It is fairly robust in its feature set, and even integrates well with MS Outlook.
Its strongest points, in my opinion are that it does not depend in any way on Active Directory, and that it [...]
