Sandra Henry-Stocker has been administering Unix systems for more than 18 years. She describes herself as "USL" (Unix as a second language) but remembers enough English to write books and buy groceries. She currently works for TeleCommunication Systems, a wireless communications company, in Annapolis, Maryland, where no one else necessarily shares any of her opinions. She lives on a small farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
This blog offers advice for every-day Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
Recursively removing empty directories from a file system might seem like a lot of work. How do you find all the directories and how do you determine programmatically which of them are empty? But let's look at how this task can be made very easy by taking advantage of the normal behavior of the rmdir command.
If your boss shows up at your desk asking if you are going to need to buy more or bigger disks for your servers, you need a quick estimate of how much disk space your servers have and how much of it is in use. Here's a quick script that will provide that information.
The fuser command comes in handy for a lot more tasks than figuring out why a file system can't be unmounted. Let's take a look at how much work it can save you for more routine tasks.
If you're a Unix systems administrator who every now and then has to tend to Cisco routers and switches, here's a book that's going to relieve your stress level. Cisco Routers for the Desperate is just that -- nearly everything you need to know when you don't have time to read the tomes of Cisco documentation.
One of the annoyances of the Unix date command is how easily one can end up with a date that's far in the past or into the future. Let's look at a simple way to find and fix files that, according to their timestamps, don't yet exist.
If you're ever tempted to send encrypted messages to a particular recipient but have never used PGP, you might be happy to learn that it's not all that hard to get started. Enter GnuPG and a handful of gpg commands!
Ever find that you needed a simple graphic of a circle, oval, rectangle or other basic shape? Simple SVG files can be created with nothing more than a text editor.
Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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