The Philosophy of Monitoring

This is a really good one too...

The Philosophy of Monitoring | League of Professional System Administrators

Cargo Cult System Administration

Great post that I had to share...

Cargo Cult System Administration

RHEL5 Interactive Startup Without Pressing "i"

This was not easy information to come by, but once I dug through RHEL5's /etc/rc.sysinit it was obvious. Instead of pressing "i" when prompted for an interactive startup (ie, asking if you want to start each service), you can add "confirm" to the kernel command line in GRUB.

Changing File Permissions

Maybe I missed the memo on this feature of chmod(1), but I really dig it.

chmod o=g foo

That sets the "other" permissions to whatever the "group" permissions are. Combine that with "-R" and you can quickly adjust the "other" permissions of a whole tree to be the same as the file/dir "group" permissions.

Of course, care should be taken so as to not grant everyone write permissions. :)

Debian pushes development of kFreeBSD port

Woohoo!!! I'll definitely be playing testing this out...

http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20091007

DHCP Usage

I don't think anybody reads this blog, but...

If anybody is reading (Hello? Is this thing on?) I have a question... How extensive is your use of DHCP? I'm slowly migrating almost every network device to statically assigned DHCP, including servers. Do you use DHCP for servers and other fixed devices?

Just wonderin'...

Upgrading RHEL from 5.3 to 5.4

I was having all sorts of strange problems while upgrading my test box from RHEL5.3 to RHEL5.4.  I did a search, but it didn't seem to turn up much... just a link to an unrelated problem, and a Russian website.  Well, I don't know Russian but I was able to decipher a hint: "yum clean all".  That did the trick.  I think I'll run that prior to upgrading all my production boxes.  Here's the error I was getting:

# yum update libX11
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
Skipping security plugin, no data
Setting up Update Process
Resolving Dependencies
Skipping security plugin, no data
--> Running transaction check
--> Processing Dependency: libX11 = 1.0.3-9.el5 for package: libX11-devel
---> Package libX11.i386 0:1.0.3-11.el5 set to be updated
--> Running transaction check
---> Package libX11-devel.i386 0:1.0.3-11.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB for package: openmotif22
--> Processing Dependency: /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB for package: openmotif
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
openmotif22-2.2.3-18.i386 from installed has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB is needed by package openmotif22-2.2.3-18.i386 (installed)
openmotif-2.3.1-2.el5.i386 from installed has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB is needed by package openmotif-2.3.1-2.el5.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB is needed by package openmotif22-2.2.3-18.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB is needed by package openmotif-2.3.1-2.el5.i386 (installed)
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
                        package-cleanup --dupes
                        rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest