This past week I needed to compare the contents of two directories to see if there were any differences. There are a TON of ways to do this, though my preferred way is to use diff with the “-r” (when comparing directories do so recursively) option to compare two folders: $ find foo1 foo1 foo1/services2 [...]
Periodically I need to start a service, but only if it’s not currently running. Other times I need to restart services on a machine, but only if they are currently running. Services may have been started on the system at boot, manually by an admin, or through a systems wide management infrastructure. They may also [...]
When I was studying for my RHCE exam, I came across a number of references to Redhat’s satellite server and its opensource spacewalk counterpart. To dig into these products a bit more, I recently attended Redhat’s deployment and systems management class. I’ve been using satellite server for the past two years, and it’s actually a [...]
I periodically need to retrieve new CentOS and Fedora releases. Sometimes I need to snag CDs (I still support machines without DVD drives), and in other cases I need DVDs. Typically when I’m playing around with new releases I grab both, and use the wget to retrieve them all at once. If you pass wget [...]
Dell provides the openmanage suite of tools to monitor and report on the hardware in their servers. I’ve managed a few hosts in the past where openmanage wasn’t installed, and I needed to locate the service tag so I could get the hardware in the server serviced. Luckily for me the dmidecode utility was installed, [...]
