Archive
Posts from 2006
Viewing Linux partitions with fdisk and partprobe
While reading up on the Linux parted utility, I came across partprobe. Partprobe can be used to display the number of partitions on a device, and is useful for quickly viewing the layout of a given device: If your looking for details on the layout of a device, I reckon fdisk is a better bet: I really dig the fdisk "-l" option!
$ read more →Adding a disk to a ZFS pool
I needed to expand a ZFS pool from a single disk to a pair of disks today. To expand my pool named "striped," I ran zpool with the "add" option, the pool name to add the disk to, and the device to add to the pool: Once the disk was added to the pool, it was immediately available for use: I used to think Veritas had the easiest method to expand file systems, but I don't think that is the case anymore. Now if we can just get Sun to allow us remove devices from a pool, and expand the number of columns in a RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 vdev!
$ read more →Displaying netstat statistics at various intervals
I periodically need to review netstat data to debug network problems, and prefer to view the deltas between two adjacent runs. The Solaris netstat utility can be passed a time interval, which will cause it to display the difference between two runs: Netstat is some good stuff!
$ read more →Viewing the last time a Centos Linux user changed their password
I often forget about the Centos Linux chage utility, and it's ability to manage the expiration data in /etc/shadow. In addition to being able to manage password policies, chage can be be run with the "-l" option to view the policy set for a user, and the date when a users password was last changed: If you have a security organization, 'chage -l' is a great command to allow them to run through sudo.
$ read more →Setting up password policies on Centos Linux hosts
I needed to setup password policies on a few CentOS 4.4 machines last week. The password policy needed to define the minimum length of a password, the number of days a password is valid, the strength of a password, and a warning period to alert individuals that their password is about to expire. Expiration data for each user is stored in their entry in /etc/shadow, and is initially populated based on the password policies in /etc/logins.defs. Here is a list of password policies that I typically set in /etc/logins.defs: For accounts that were created without a password policy, the chage command can be used to create one…
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