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IBM Launches AIX 6 Open Beta Program
2007-05-22 11:05:00 Finally some news from IBM on the upcoming version 6 of AIX! IBM just launched an open beta program and apparently welcomes anyone to take part in testing the release of AIX. Judging by the new features being announced in this soonish-to-arrive relase, IBM appears to be making an effort picking up the ball that it dropped on actually developing its flagship OS instead of just incrementally adding More About: Open , Beta , Program
Disabling SSH Client Hostname Resolution on Solairs 10
2007-05-22 10:29:00 Outside of a whole raft of "celebrity" features (i.e ZFS, Dtrace, SMF, FMA, etc, etc.) added into Solaris 10, I'm still discovering nice little changes that leave a good feeling of added improvement. One such nicety I discovered today is the LookupClient Hostname s option available for the SSH daemon. Before this option was available the Solaris SSH daemon would always try to resolve the address of More About: Lair , Resolution
/etc/shadow - encryption or hashing?
2007-05-03 07:08:00 It is kind of funny how people refer to the stuff stored in /etc/shadow as "encrypted passwords" (on HP-UX it is notably still in /etc/passwd most of the time). If you know even tiny little bit about cryptography, you should know that it is completely incorrect. People in the know also say it simply because the overloaded use of word "encrypted" became too commonplace. Well, the passwords in the More About: Encryption , Shadow , Crypt
HOWTO Mount a CD-ROM into a Local Zone on Solaris 10
2007-03-15 01:04:00 Imagine a situation when you need to install software from a CD-ROM into a local zone on Solar is 10. As you may know the CD-ROM physical device is not available in the local zone and therefore you can not access the media directly. Of course you can copy the files from the CD-ROM to a local zone directly from within a global zone as the most straightforward solution, but that would be a little More About: Local , Howto , Solaris , Zone
Tcl Rules the Roost on Regular Expressions
2007-03-07 06:06:00 Tcl doesn't enjoy nearly as much popularity as Perl. Even though Perl is considered the scripting language of choice for doing regular expression processing on text, apparently Tcl beats Perl quite handily as far as speed of regular processing is concerned. The regex-dna benchark that is particularly sensitive to the speed of processing of RE's is good demonstration of Tcl's prowess in regular More About: Press , Rules , Expressions , Regular , Sion
HOWTO Turn Off Annoying Beeps
2007-02-23 00:03:00 What can be more annoying than beeping each time you make some sort of a mistake typing in a command or editing a document? I don't think anything else can beat that, incessant beeping tops my chart of computer annoyances. If you have your terminal open in an X Window environment (regardless of the window manager or desktop environment used), you can turn off the beeps as easily as running the More About: Howto , Turn , Anno , Annoying
Sun Takes a Swing at Oracle/Linux with PostgreSQL
2007-02-21 23:35:00 Hmmm, it looks like Sun is getting serious with Post greSQL database and packaging it with Solaris 10. In this news story Sun is reported to have migrated a customer off of Oracle /Linux combination onto PostgreSQL/Solaris with much success. I'm sure this sort of move is not going to gel very well with Oracle, who has been a long standing Sun partner. And for a good reason - Solaris has always been More About: With , Take
Secure Encrypted Tape Backups with Solaris 10
2007-02-13 13:12:00 News stories announcing that some big institution lost backup tapes containing private data for millions of identities became pretty common nowadays. And it is hardly surprising considering that there is always room for mistake when number of tapes shuffled back and forth is large enough and performed frequently. What is surprising that the the take-up of encrypting the data before it is stored More About: Backup , Solar , With , Back , Solaris
HOWTO Dump Core of a Process on HP-UX
2007-02-07 07:03:00 Once in a while you might run into a situation when an application process is not behaving correctly, hangs, or leaks memory gradually ballooning in size. Usually it is an indication of a bug in the process and most of the time you would need to get in touch with application developers with sufficient evidence to describe the suspected bug. Since overwhelmingly sysadmins don't like developers More About: Core , Howto , Proc , Process
Name Resolution Snag in Solaris 10 - /etc/hosts and DNS
2007-02-03 11:00:00 I came across an interesting nuance in Solar is 10 that seems to have been been introduced into the name resolution process with the release of version 10. Apparently the /etc/inet/ipnodes database is now always searched before /etc/hosts database with DNS configured. The reason it matters is that in my testing and development environment I used to overriding the fully qualified domain name of More About: Name , Host , Solaris , Solution
Is HP Going to Announce HP-UX 11i v3 on Feb 16?
2007-02-02 07:54:00 Grapevine is talking that there is a good chance that HP will announce the HP-UX 11i v3 on Feb 16. The reason for such speculations is the fact that HP just announced a press conference that will be held by Ann Livermore, Mark Hudson, and Nick van der Zweep all of which are executives with strong ties to the Servers division at HP and most notably Virtualization and Utility Computing division in More About: Going , Anno , Goin
Unix vs Windows Survival Stats (Security)
2007-02-02 02:58:00 SANS institute produces and publishes a "survival" time statistics based on the empirical data gathered from its storm centers. Survival time is basically the amount of time that it takes for an unpatched machined placed on the wide open network to be hacked in. Well, as it comes out in SANS report the survival time for an average Microsoft Wind ows machine is 237 minutes, which means on average a More About: Security , Unix , Stats
ICMP Ping of Death Can DoS Solaris 10
2007-02-02 02:36:00 Sun just issued an advisory for a security issue in Solar is 10 that can cause a Denial of Service (DoS) attack against machines running the latest version of Solaris . It looks like this vulnerability in the Solaris 10 network stack in the ICMP protocol handling process in particular allows attackers to panic the system by issuing a specially crafted ICMP packet to a vulnerable machine. It looks More About: Death , Ping
Which Unix Flavor is Most Popular - Job Market Tells the Story
2007-01-31 08:24:00 Many consider the number of available jobs dealing with supporting OS as a more or less reliable indicator for popularity of that OS in the marketplace. I decided to do some checks of my own on the number of currently available jobs for major Unix OS flavors, BSD, and Linux. I used Monster.com in the United States as a source of available jobs, since the USA market represents the largest IT job More About: Pop , Story , Market , Popular
Novell Claims Linux is Better than Vista
2007-01-31 05:49:00 Even though Novel l and Microsoft signed their little agreement allowing Microsoft to distribute Linux , it is not all singing and dancing between these two vendors. In this report Novell goes as far as saying that SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is actually better than the new fangled Microsoft Windows Vista . It is an eye brow raising claim on any count, since to this date all major Linux vendors More About: Better
HOWTO Reverse the Contents of File
2007-01-30 23:43:00 Power and conciseness of Perl is quite impressive and I get reminders of that every time I have to solve a seemingly complicated problem, which is then solved by just a few lines of Perl. Case in point today I had process the logs and feed the resulting data to a reporting utility we use in house. And this is where I hit a snag - the log files as you're well aware are in chronological order ( More About: File , Content , Howto , Contents , Ever
HOWTO Record and Apply Macros in vi (ViM)
2007-01-24 05:53:00 If you read my previous blog entries you should know of my aversion to typing things more than once - all repetitive tasks should be automated. This applies not only to doing things at the command line, but also while editing documents. Fortunately vi (and Vim particular) lend themselves very well to automating things while performing the edits. On particularly useful feature on this front is the More About: Mac , Howto , Record , Macro , Macros
Hunting for Classes in Jars
2007-01-23 11:22:00 Enterprise applications on Unix nowadays equate to J2EE apps most of the time. I would be hard pressed to find any major enterprise application running on Unix, which wouldn't have at least part of it implemented in Java. And administering Java applications (and troubleshooting them) invariably entails dealing with class files, which are packaged in jars (Java Archives) most of time. And dealing More About: Classes , Class , Hunting , Hunt , Jars
HOWTO Display a Process Tree on HP-UX
2007-01-23 08:23:00 I sorely miss the proc tools found on Solaris and Linux each time I have to deal with HP-UX - the tools pfiles, ptree, pkill, pgrep are just too valuable to go without. Here is just one hack I found that can effectively do the same function as ptree (well, sort of): bash-3.00# UNIX95=1 ps -HefThe output of all processes on the system will grouped by parent process id's with children processes More About: Play , Display , Howto , Tree , Proc
A Small, But Useful bit of Solaris Trivia
2007-01-23 01:51:00 Here is a good question you can ask a potential candidate for a Solar is admin position during an interview -- what is the standard device name for a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM on Solaris ? More than likely you will here "it depends" or something alone the lines of "/dev/dsk/c0t60d0" from those who spent too much time around older Sun systems. For some reason not too many admins seem to know that "/dev/ More About: Trivia , Small , Mall
Spring Cleaning the Device Tree on Solaris
2007-01-22 08:13:00 If you frequently add and remove devices on your Solar is machine, which especially frequent when you have Solaris running on your laptop and using a number of USB devices is a day-to-day reality. Big systems with a large number of LUN's attached also suffer from the same problem, when LUN's are moved or removed. As time goes you're may be left with an un-tidy device tree that is polluted with More About: Cleaning , Spring , Lean , Clean
Trusted Desktop Demo
2007-01-22 07:26:00 On the subject of Trust ed Extensions, there is nice little demo on the new Sun Security Learning Center site demonstrating how the Trusted Desk top works in Solaris for the uninitiated: See the Trusted Java Desktop System - the world's first integrated multi-level GNOME-based GUI in action. The basic point to be taken from this demo is how the Trusted Desktop separates access to the data between More About: Demo , Rust
HowTo Install Trusted Extensions on Solaris
2007-01-22 07:04:00 Want to play around with the new fangled features Solar is Trusted Extentions? Here is a new document posted on the on the OpenSolaris web site that describes step-by-step how to install the Trusted Extensions software on the laptop computer: Installing the Solaris 10 11/06 Trusted Extensions Software on a Laptop Computer More About: Tension , Tall , Howto
An Interesting Bit of IBM AIX Trivia
2007-01-21 01:51:00 Here is an interesting bit of IBM AIX trivia I found in Wikipedia AIX entry. As it comes out large part of the AIX kernel was written in PL/I at least in the AIX v2 days. For a Unix operating system it is actually quite unusual, since overwhelmingly the Unix kernels are usually written in a mixture of C and Assembly. I wonder if the same PL/I bits are still there in AIX 5L 5.3. It would be really More About: Interesting , Inter , Trivia , Interest , Sting
Split Mode Editing in vi (Vim)
2007-01-21 00:35:00 Editing large files is always a painful experience especially if you have to refer two or more parts of the document at the same time. Most often I deal with these sorts of situations when I have to debug a problem with an application and study the source code. This is when it is nice to have the "function declaration" view and the "function implementation" view or "calling function" view and the More About: Mode , Edit , Editing , Split
Sun Neptune ASIC -- Should We Expect Some Solaris/SPARC Routers Soon?
2007-01-20 04:46:00 Alone with a couple of high profile announcements made by Sun Microsystems yesterday regarding Niagara and Rock, Sun also mentioned a project code-named Neptune . It appears that Neptune is an ASIC that will enable the SPARC powered machines to support 10GB Ethernet. Apparently the Neptune will work in concert with with the multicore Niagara and Rock chips that will offload some network specific More About: Solar , Expect , Should , Solaris
Correct yourself faster in bash
2007-01-20 03:34:00 I'm not the greatest typist -- I make a lot of mistakes in the process, but typing is something I do a lot of being a Unix sysadmin and spending at least an entire working day interfacing with the command line. And being a bad typist can be a frustrating exercise especially if you have to deal with long pathnames in shell -- when you realize that you got it wrong you have to either bring back the More About: Yourself , Self , Your , Fast , Bash
How to capture Oracle sqlplus output to a shell variable
More articles from this author:2007-01-19 12:58:00 Unix is platform of choice for relational databases, so if you're a Unix admin regardless of particular flavor you're supporting, be it Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, or Tru64, there is a good chance that a lot of times you double as a DBA. Being a Unix DBA there are lot of times when you have to interface your shell scripts with the database, in other words quite frequently you need your scripts to More About: How To , Oracle , Shell , Vari , Aria 1, 2 |
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