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:
$ free
[...]
I recently had to manually add a few users to /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd on an OpenBSD 3.9 server. After I added the entries, the accounts were still unable to login. I started poking around with ktrace, and noticed that during a normal account creation session the files /etc/pwd.db and /etc/spwd.db were modified:
$ ls -la /etc/*.db
-rw-r–r– [...]
I manage a fair number of servers, and use several tools to monitor the health of my systems. One such tool is logsentry (formerly known as logcheck), which is a shell script that can be used to monitor logfiles for anomalies. Logsentry consists of a single shell script and one or more violation files, and [...]
While persuing the OpenBSD ports collection a few weeks ago, I came across the ifstat utility. This nifty utility allows you to view bandwidth totals for each interface in a server, and at specific intervals. Here is a sample run showing the bandwidth in and out of the sis0 and sis1 Ethernet interfaces, and the [...]
OpenBSD has a number of nifty utilities, and I happened to come across the systat(1) utility this weekend while looking for an executable in /usr/bin. Systat prints out performance data in an ncurses display, and can be used to view CPU saturation, I/O statistics, swap utilization, netstat data, and MBUF and network interface utilization. The [...]
