I previously discussed using pca to get security updates. One thing I didn’t realize at the time was pca’s ability to list or install only the patches that are classified as security and reliability updates. This ability to filter patches is accomplished by adding the “r” (reliability updates) or “s” (security updates) character to one [...]
One nifty feature that recently made it’s way into OpenBSD is the ability to remotely update packages with the pkg_add utility. This is accomplished by adding the URL of a remote repository to the PKG_PATH variable, and then running pkg_add with the “-u” (update packages) and optional “-v” (verbose output) and “-i” (interactice installation) options: [...]
Each and every operating systemI support has a different utility to report on swap usage. On my Soalris hosts, I use the swap and vmstat utilities to check utilization: $ swap -s total: 36176k bytes allocated + 4672k reserved = 40848k used, 1189004k available On Linux hosts, I use teh free and top utilities: $ [...]
To protect the communciations between an iSCSI initiator and target, the iSCSI protocol allows an enhanced CRC32 checksum to be used (this isn’t enabled on most initiators and targets by default) to protect the iSCSI headers and data payload. The Solaris iSCSI initiator supports both header and data payload checksums, which can be enabled with [...]
LDAP indexes are extremely useful for speeding up directory searches, and come in four flavors (there are actually more than four index types, but the following four are the most common): 1 Approximate indexes Approximate indexes are useful for speeding up seaches that look for attribute values that sound like a specific value. A good [...]
Most modern day UNIX operating systems store password expiration data in /etc/shadow. This expiration data includes the last time a user changed their password, the number of days a user can use a given password, an interval to warn a user that their password is going to expire, etc. There are six (I don’t count [...]
