Active Directory (AD) is a fact of life. There, I said it. And as a predominantly Linux-based consultant, much of my job is often dancing around the periphery of the Microsoft world, making Linuxy things work with Windowsy things. So, dance I shall… Often I find myself in the position of setting up a Linux-based [...]
As a sysadmin (probably like you), sometimes I need to whip up special-purpose mini-scripts to do simple monitoring tasks that I don’t want to bother our main monitoring system with… This is one of them… I needed to monitor a network device (an appliance, actually) constantly and rapidly, to see if the interface was flapping [...]
Here’s a fun one for you. I had a situation recently where the customer had some of his windows PCs properly being populated in his reverse DNS zone (in an AD-controlled environment), and some that were not. He asked me to quickly scan the network and figure out which were which (before we started to [...]
This basic (re-worded) question came in from Jeff: “Why won’t my remote filesystem mount unmount when I try the umount command?” It’s very true: If you try to umount (unmount) a filesystem that is currently being accessed, it will not let you do it. And it will tell you something like, “umount: /media/ncp: device is [...]
There are lots of ways to design and run your dhcp server and environment. Over the years, I’ve kinda’ fallen in-and-out of love with DHCP clustering; I’ve just come to the conclusion that it is more trouble than it’s worth. I stumbled on this “peering” or “fail-over” method of running dhcpd when I was preparing [...]
I like the agedu utility. I recently found it while searching the ‘net, and I want to thank all involved with it (see the page for credits and info). This neat utility helps you get a general understanding of two main things: 1.) How much space you’ve consumed on the filesystem, and 2.) roughly how [...]
I learned lots of cool stuff last week while I was out in Provo, Utah, at Novell’s ATT Live sessions. There was simply not enough time to attend all the class sessions I wanted (in the 4 days I was there), but I’m getting through all the slide presentations and labs for the ones I [...]
This question came to me from Rune (his question is edited for brevity): I’ve got a SLES 9.3 system where the users are using gzip to compress their daily online DB backups. It’s scripted, but basically it goes something like this: # dbbackup db1 /scratch/outputfile1 # gzip /scratch/outputfile1 # dbbackup db1 /scratch/outputfile2 # gzip /scratch/outputfile2 [...]
This is a follow-up to an older post about administering a Linux machine from Windows, that can be found here. So, you want to get remote desktop access to your Linux server’s GUI from a Windows machine. Well, NoMachine is a great way to do it. Assuming you have a working GUI on the Linux [...]
So you have a task that you want to run regularly on Linux/Unix. It could be a single commend, or a script that you prepared in advance that contains all the command you need run. What you need to do is to set up a “Cron job”. Cron is a system that, when the cron [...]
