Category: Uncategorized

I recently upgraded some hosts to Fedora 11 which has Samba 3.4 included. I configure most of the hosts I control to be integrated with Active Directory for authentication and this upgrade broke that authentication. The problem was that the winbind daemon was not able to query the LDAP server which was used as the…

A fairly typical scenario when installing software that does not come fro the distribution package manager is to install an application and find that it cannot find a library necessary to run, although the library is definitely installed.  I recently ran into this issue when compiling spine on an old Debian Sarge system. $ ./spine…

When reviewing the history file in bash, it’s terrible not knowing when a command was executed.  Using the HISTTIMEFORMAT variable in a .bashrc file, the timestamp can be added to all commands. # ~/.bashrc HISTTIMEFORMAT=”%m/%d/%y %I:%M:%S %p ” Sample output: 525  05/21/09 07:56:46 PM tail -f /var/log/messages  /var/log/secure As you can see, the command is…

I just spent a bit of time troubleshooting a path issue with sudo on a CentOS server.  This is a note to self to preserve this bit of knowledge. When dealing with sudo, the only time the PATH environment variable will be preserved is if it’s in .bashrc and NOT in .bash_profile.

When building out a system with a boot partition using software RAID, it is critical to install GRUB on both drives to that if one fails, the other can be used to boot the system. 1. Make sure that the RAID volume is synchronized (assuming /dev/md0 for /boot): mdadm -D /dev/md0 2. Install grub on…

One of the biggest bottlenecks in any system is the hard disk drive.  I found HyperOS Systems while reviewing the MySQL users mailing list yesterday.  This company sells a device that you can plug DDR2 RAM into and use as a Solid State Disk.  They also provide a battery and CF backup system in case…

The Linux Foundation recently had a contest to see who could come up with a video to compete with the “I’m a Mac” and “I’m a PC” ads.  Here is the winner.

I came across this handy page which details LUN alignment offset via fdisk: Setting the offset. Apparently this comes in handy when working with EMC Clarriions.