Awk & sed Snippets for SysAdmins

Automatic File Backups in VIM

Having to undo stupid changes to config files is an unfortunate side effect of too few sysadmins supporting too many servers. The VIM editor has some built-in file backup options. However, I find these options …

Backup Options for Raspberry Pi

Just about every Raspberry Pi I used suffered the same fate: the micro SD card died. It is generally accepted that the expected lifespan of an SD card is around ten years of normal use.

Backing Up WSL Images

Microsoft’s WSL is interesting. I’d go as far as to say that I like it. The mistake here would be to forget that your Linux image is running under Windows, with everything this entails. Making …

Home-Brew Ransomware Defense

The first well-known case of ransomware was documented in 1989. The so-called AIDS Trojan was delivered on a floppy disc; encrypted data; demanded $189.00 (nearly four hundred bucks in today’s money) as a “license fee”. …

CD/DVD-to-ISO Helper Script

I can’t recall the last time I needed to convert a CD to ISO. I have four laptops and not one even has a DVD drive. It took me a while to find an external …

Install and Configure Etckeeper

Etckeeper is a handy tool that uses git to keep track of changes to anything in /etc (or any other folder you choose). It’s very simple to use and can help you quickly identify and undo stupid …

Rsync Time Backup

This is a simple wrapper for the awesome rsync-time-backup script by Laurent Cozic. Through clever use of hard links rsync-time-backup greatly speeds up incremental backups and saves disk space.

Filesystem Synchronization with Freehold

Whenever an application description begins with phrases like “runs on anything” and “is easy to setup”, attribute such bravado to the author’s lack of experience outside his development sandbox. Freehold comes as a tarball for “any Linux” …

Monitoring NetBackup Daemons

Here’s an example of a script you can use to monitor NetBackup server daemons in a Linux environment. The main difficulty with keeping track of these services is that there are so many of them. …

Create ISO Images

The genisoimage has been around for a few years, but is relatively little-known. It is a pre-mastering program to generate ISO9660/Joliet/HFS hybrid filesystems and is particularly good for creating portable data backups. Here are a …

Filesystem Syncronization with Lsyncd

Lsyncd monitors a local filesystem for changes and mirrors those changes to a filesystem on a remote server. The advantage of lsyncd over rsync is the former’s ability to detect filesystem changes without having to re-scan …

Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7

Recently I upgraded a client’s Vista computer (Toshiba Qosmio, 4Gb, Intel Core Duo P7350, 7200-RPM 200-Gb disk) from Vista Ultimate 64-bit to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Being a Unix sysadmin this is not something I usually do. How did the experience compare to upgrading HP-UX, Solaris or SLES? In a nutshell: I’d rather walk around all day in wet underwear than attempt to upgrade Vista ever again.

NetBackup Command Guide

NetBackup is an enterprise-level distributed backup and recovery application. The environment consists of the master server, media server, storage library, networking hardware, and client agents. NetBackup supports a wide variety of Unix, Linux, VMS, and Windows systems. The original backup solution was developed by Control Data Corp., later acquired by Openvision, which gave the product its “NetBackup” name. NetBackup was then bought by Veritas and is currently owned and supported (poorly) by Symantec.

Copying Data: Are We There Yet?

I am sure this will sound familiar: you are copying a large amount of data – either locally or over the network – and you are wondering how long it will take and if there is a way to make things go faster.You may be surprised, but it does matter what type of files you are copying: 1Gb-worth of many small files will take considerably longer to copy than two 500Mb files. The hardware you are using is an important consideration, but it’s not the only factor limiting data transfer speed.

Solaris boot disk copy using dd

The following Korn shell script will make a bootable copy of the boot disk on a Solaris system. The script uses dd and requires that the source disk and destination disk have the same geometry.

Command-line backup methods

The following is a brief overview of standard Unix comman-line utilities used for data backup on Solaris systems. Most of the information below is also applicable to other unixoid systems.

Working with ISO images on Solaris

The following two commands will take all data in /home/neal, copy it to the ISO file, and burn the ISO file to a recordable CD.

NetBackup statistics, Part II

This script uses the output of the script in the previous example to calculate yearly backup load for each Veritas NetBackup client.

NetBackup statistics, Part I

The following script will calculate total size of data backups for each Veritas NetBackup client over the past week (or as defined by the “daysago” variable in the script). The final output will be uploaded …

Using rsync to copy files

In the following example we need to make sure that /export/home on server host2 looks exactly like /export/home on host1. Thus, our SOURCE is host1:/export/home and our TARGET is host2:/export/home
There are two ways of using …

Copying directories using tar and rsync

Best Diets Overall 2023

If your goal is to manage your weight long term and eat healthfully, try one of these science-backed diets that work. Each earns top marks from our panel of leading medical and nutriton …

Using NetBackup to restore boot disk

enable “Rename hard links”
disable “Rename soft links”
if root of destination drive is mounted as /destination/ then select “Restore to alternate path: from / to /destination/ , Restore search path
This is the alternate path for everything: …