Archive
Posts from 2011
A real world approach to learning new Operating Systems
New Operating Systems don't pop into existence every day, but there are a slew of them out there. This includes various versions of Windows, BSD OSs, a number of Linux distributions, Solaris, AIX, Plan 9 as well as several others. As a technology geek I'm always looking to learning something new, and I recently got the opportunity to expand my Operating System knowledge. I'm now spending a good bit of my time learning everything there is to know about IBM's AIX…
$ read more →Useful crontab short cuts
While reading through crontab(5) this morning I came across this useful nugget of information: "These special time specification "nicknames" are supported, which replace the 5 initial time and date fields, and are prefixed by the @ character" This translates into the following known time periods: So instead of writing: You can specify hourly to accomplish the same thing: @hourly command_to_run Or if you want to run something when a machine is rebooted you can add this: @reboot echo "" | mail -s " was recently rebooted" root Several of these short cuts are rather handy and it makes things easier to read IMHO. Gotta love short cuts!
$ read more →How to expand you technical book library on the cheap
I recently got the opportunity to start supporting a number of AIX systems, and being an AIX newbie the first thing I did was ask myself how can I learn everything there is to know about AIX (more to come on this topic tomorrow)? Being a readaholic, I decided to wander over to Amazon to see which AIX books were available. After 10 minutes of searching and reading reviews, I ended up snagging a copy of AIX 5L Administration for $5. That $5 also included shipping…
$ read more →Getting VMWare tools to configure on Solaris 10 guests
I built out a Solaris 10 update 10 guest on a vSphere 4.1 machine this past week. When I went to configure VMWare tools I received the following error: After doing some debugging I noticed that /mnt is used temporarily and if you happen to be using it (or if volfs is) the installer will fail. I temporarily stopped volfs and unmounted a device that was mounted on /mnt and the installer completed without issue. Figure I would share this with others so you don't have to waste your time debugging this problem.
$ read more →Remounting Linux read-only file systems read-write
I've been paged countless times to investigate systems that have gone off the air for one reason or another. Typically when look into these issues the server has crashed unexpectedly (bug, hardware, etc.) and rebooted in an attempt to get a fresh start on life. On occassion the box won't boot due to a misconfiguration or inconsistent file system, and the server will be left with a read-only root file system and no network connectivity. Fixing this is pretty easy…
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