-
VMware virtual or not?
Depending on naming, in a VMware environment you may not actually be sure if a Linux system is VMware or not. Here’s a quick command to find out: sudo dmidecode -s system-manufacturer which will generally output “VMware, Inc.” if VMware. On older systems you may find “-s” doesn’t work, in which case just pipe “dmidecode”…
-
Installing Plixer’s “Scrutinizer” NPMD
Plixer makes a good “Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics” (NPMD) application called “Scrutinizer“. NPMD, as Gartner calls it, mostly omeans, collecting, aggregating, and reporting on Netflow data. Plixer provides a VMware OVF for installation of a virtual appliance. I, however, ran into a few issues with the installation: I couldn’t get the install to work…
-
Ubuntu package commands
Because Ubuntu has a mix of utilities to manage packages I constantly seem to be forgetting the options I need when I go to do basic package management. Mostly for my sake are the ones I use most regularly: List installed packages: dpkg -l dpkg –get-selections List names of available packages (including those not installed):…
-
Get RPM install date
Sometimes you don’t know when an RPM was installed – maybe it was updated, maybe it came with the system. In any case, it can be handy when debugging or even for auditing purposes. This gives an example of getting the install time for the “filesystem” package: somehost% rpm -q filesystem –queryformat ‘%{name} %{installtime:date}\n’ filesystem…
-
Dell Service Tag the easy way under Linux
Sometimes you need the service tag or model off a Dell server that isn’t in your possession. You can either find some feet on the street to do it or as it turns out, with Linux, you can use “dmidecode”: someserver# dmidecode | more … blah … blah … blah … System Information Manufacturer: Dell Inc.…
-
How to probe ethernet capabilities…
Mostly for my own edification – use “ethtool”, eg: 1# Â ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 100Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation:…
-
How to dump the Firefox history (Linux)
Not pretty, but gets you there: Find and go to your Firefox profile (usually you can locate by going to “~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default”). Run “sqlite3 places.sqlite .dump | grep moz_places” If Firefox is running you may have to copy the “places.sqlite” to a new file then run the “sqlite3” against it. You can’t dump it while Firefox…
-
Testing “sendmail” with immediate delivery
In the old days when using “sendmail” if you wanted to watch the SMTP conversation between the local host and the next mail relay all you’d have to do is either run “sendmail -v” or “mail -v” (or “mailx -v” depending on the OS). It would then output the entire SMTP conversation with the remote…
-
Four keyboard shortcuts you should know…
I’m writing this because I see so many people who use computers regularly who don’t know these basic keyboard shortcuts. They’re easy – learn them and your computer life will be much better. Most work on pretty much any GUI (Windows, Unix, even Mac substituting the CMD key for the CTRL key). So with no…
-
How to build a SLES minicd boot image…
Sometimes you’ll have a system that doesn’t have a DVD drive and/or it’s more convenient to use the network. Making a “minicd” to boot from network is fairly simple: Set up Apache and copy the DVD media to a subdirectory of “/srv/www/htdocs”. At least in my case I ended up with two directories: /srv/www/htdocs/SLES11SP1/SLES-11-SP1-DVD-x86_64.0432..001/ /srv/www/htdocs/SLES11SP1/SLES-11-SP1-DVD-x86_64.0432..002/…
-
The unfortunate truth about Exchange
Up until the last year my workplace used IMAP servers running on Linux and Solaris to manage and deliver mail. Then we decided because of the collaborative benefits, particularly with mobile devices like Blackberrys, to move to Exchange. The results have been dramatic, and this chart made by Google to espouse their GMail product reflects…
-
How to convert to/from DOS format in VIM…
It’s very easy, but also easy to forget how to convert to or from a DOS format file in Unix using “vim” (Vi iMproved), the Open Source “vi”. If the file is in DOS format and you want to convert to Unix, use the command: :set ff=unix note that “ff” is an abreviation for “fileformat”…
-
Disabling Firefox Resume From Crash
Though to many it’s handy, personally I find Firefox‘s “Resume from Crash” function, well, annoying. This function makes it so that if Firefox is killed prematurely that the next time you start it you get an (annoying) popup that asks you if you want to restore the previous state/page(s) that Firefox was viewing. I can…
-
Custom Google RedHat Kickstart List search engine
Michael DeHaan at RedHat has created a custom Google “search engine” to search the RedHat Kickstart List archives (the RedHat mailing list “kickstart-list@redhat.com“). It looks pretty handy to not have to use other perhaps more painful tools (or get too much noise): http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=016811804524159694721%3A1h7btspnxtu This whole idea of custom Google Search Engines (which appears to be…
-
CrossLoop – secure remote access
A friend of mine showed me what looks like a nice (free) secure remote access solution for visually managing a remote PC: http://www.crossloop.com It’s based on TightVNC and therefor has the advantage of using encryption on the control session, helping reduce the risk of prying eyes. It also has a pretty cool way of letting…
-
SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas Blog
Here’s a potentially interesting Novell SUSE blog where you might expect a little more “off the cuff” information from the SUSE development teams: http://opsamericas.com There seem to be some interesting articles about a range of things including licensing, desktop lockdown, how to add/update drives to AutoYast etc…
-
Fedora 8, NIS (or LDAP), and “gdmgreeter”
One major issue with Fedora 8 in shops that use a network user repository like NIS or LDAP is “gdmgreeter” breaks (note “gdmgreeter” is the Fedora replacement for XDM). The symptom is X11will fail repeatedly and not come up. In that case you will also see errors like this in “/var/log/messages”: Jun 13 12:18:00 myhost…
-
Fedora Core 6-isms
While in the organizations I have sway over we are working to rid ourselves of older out of maintenance OSes, I do occasionally run into some Fedora Core 6. When I do there are a couple of minor hacks you regularly have to do to make things work (note these are after applying the latest…
-
Good RPM documention
Good documentation for maintaining/creating Linux RPMs is difficult to find. This Wraptastic site seems to have so good stuff: http://wraptastic.org It appears official, but it’s hard to say since the site seems to lack an “about” to key off of. In a related line, these two RedHat sites seem to have copies of the “Maximum…
-
How to create a mini-boot CD for SLES 10 SP1
If you have an older system that doesn’t have an internal DVD but you do have an external USB DVD, here’s how to build a CD to boot from. This will probably work with any version of SLES 10: Boot Linux and mount the SLES 10 DVD. mkdir /tmp/mini-boot cp <path-to-DVD-mount>/boot/i386/loader/* /tmp/mini-boot mkisofs -o /tmp/mini-boot.iso…