Awk & sed Snippets for SysAdmins

Monitoring Veritas VM problems on Solaris

Several Veritas VM and system logs can be used to monitor and diagnose problems with the Volume Manager. An automated script can be used to grab the last few lines from these logs whenever a …

Timeline Plots with GNUPlot

GNUPlot is an open-source versitile data plotting and mathematical charting application. Timeline plot is the most common type of a plot you would generate. It also seems that it’s one of the more capricious features …

Simple network monitoring with ping

In the Spring of 2005 Comcast experienced a major DNS outage. Since then many Comcast users have switched to DNS servers that belong to Verizon and other ISPs. Comcast started taking a lot of flak …

Solaris One-Liners

Useful Solaris commands for system administrators

CUPS printing on Solaris 10

Download the Companion CD for Solaris 10 GA on: Solaris 10 Companion cd download

Generating complex SQL queries with shell scripts

It is sometimes necessary to use complex select and insert queries with dozens of variables. Writing such queries by hand is a tedious process and the chance of making a mistake is high. A few …

NFS-mount “Permission denied” error

NFS is a relatively uncomplicated functionality of any Unix system. However, from time to time you are bound to run in the “permission denied” error while trying to NFS-mount a filesystem. Everything seems to be …

Protected: Notes on Electronic Security

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Wget Google image collector

Google Images is an extremely useful tool for webmasters, designers, editors, and just about anybody else who’s in a hurry to find just the right photo or clipart. However, this Google tool has a couple …

PHP Web Development Software

ASP.NET developers have been spoiled by intuitive but inflexible GUIs and IDEs. These Microsoft tools (and various third-party add-ons) make your life as a programmer relatively painless; but only as long as you don’t try …

Accessing Samba server in DMZ

This note explains how to access a Samba server located on the “orange” DMZ subnet from a Windows PC on the “green” LAN. The problem for Samba is caused by the firewall blocking NETBIOS responses. …

Find and Replace in MySQL

A simple one-line command to perform find and replace operations in MySQL:

KDE 3.2 Desktop

Some screenshots of KDE 3.2 running under SuSE 9.2 on an AMD 64 machine with CrossOver Windows emulator and Microsoft Office XP installed.

A general view of the KDE desktop with one of the standard backgrounds.

Here’s …

Sun Java Desktop

A few screenshots taken with Sun Java Desktop running under Solaris 10 on a SunBlade 2000 workstation, which also works great as a heated footstool when placed under your desk.

A general view of the desktop …

Monitoring process CPU and memory usage

This article contains examples of using prstat to monitor CPU and memory utilization by individual processes and groups of processes.
Example 1: Show CPU and memory usage by all processes called “*ora_smon_imanax*”
The following prstat command will …

Using pkg-get on Solaris

Pkg-get Installation Notes
Pkg-get is an open-source,  Sun-approved software installation and management tool for Sun Solaris. You can use pkg-get to install a variety of pre-compiled software without having to worry about version compatibility, patch requirements, …

Installing SuSE Linux 10 on a laptop

What’s the best Linux distro for desktop applications? My subjective opinion based on years of Linux experience is that SuSE 10 at the moment offers the best combination of features and user friendliness. The latter, …

Veritas Enterprise Administrator GUI

The following is an overview of the GUI for Veritas Enterprise Administrator 3.2

Exporting spreadsheet data to MySQL

The following is a process for migrating spreadsheet data to MySQL database using a Shell script in a Unix environment. To follow this tutorial you must already know how to create MySQL schemas and tables. …

Script to modify Veritas HA Cluster Resource Configuration

The following interactive Korn shell script can be used to make common changes to the configuration of Veritas HA Cluster resources. The script enables you to view the listing of available resources; view resource configuration; …

Bounce Veritas HA Cluster resource

The following is a Korn shell script that can be used from command line or cron to bounce a Veritas HA Cluster resource. This can be useful to resolve certain problems with Oracle databases running …

Cygwin X-server configuration

To connect with Cygwin to a Unix X-server in XDMCP-broadcast mode, create a shortcut as shown below. In the target field enter: