http://www.itworld.com/taxonomy/term/415/all xx http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/85055/solaris-tip-have-your-files-changed-since-installation One way to check the integrity of files on your Solaris systems is by comparing their ownership, sizes and checksums against their original values. You don't need expensive application software to do basic integrity checking. One easy and free way to do this is to take advantage of a file that your system maintains on your behalf and a command called pkgchk. http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/85055/solaris-tip-have-your-files-changed-since-installation#comments IT management/strategy Operating systems How-to /var/sadm/install/contents checksum file size installation Sandra Henry-Stocker Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:16:58 -0500 Sandra Henry-Stocker 85055 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/84391/looping-easy-way One of the nice things about writing a column every week is that I don't often have to tackle the really big issues -- such as why Unix is still the best OS or which big company is buying which other big company and how this is going to affect all of us. Instead, I can hone in on an issue as small and personal as how you loop through a sequence of values in a script. Speaking of looping, I've just learned (and then implemented) a new trick. http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/84391/looping-easy-way#comments IT management/strategy Operating systems How-to generate list loop counter Sandra Henry-Stocker seq command Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:51:08 -0500 Sandra Henry-Stocker 84391 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/83437/grepping-whole-words If every time you grep for a specific word or string, you get a pile of lines that don't match what you were looking for, maybe it's time to learn about whole word searching. In today's column, we examine two ways to get what you want, the whole of what you want and nothing but what you want. http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/83437/grepping-whole-words#comments IT management/strategy Operating systems How-to grep -w regular expression Sandra Henry-Stocker whole words Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:55:36 -0500 Sandra Henry-Stocker 83437 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/tech-amp-society/82470/your-web-site-under-attack If you have a web site, the answer is undoubtedly "yes". Someone somewhere or, more likely, quite a few someones are attempting to attack your site or the system on which it is running. Assuming hackers have found your site and are testing it for holes that they might crawl through, let's take a look at how you can uncover evidence of their exploits with a quick examination of your web logs. http://www.itworld.com/tech-amp-society/82470/your-web-site-under-attack#comments Security How-to buffer overflow Perl Sandra Henry-Stocker SQL injection web logs Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:24:27 -0400 Sandra Henry-Stocker 82470 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/81833/easy-email-filtering-procmail Tossing email into the /dev/null bit bucket is fine when you know the account in question will never receive any valid form of email. You can, however, get a much finer degree of control over email and still automate the cleanup of spam by using a tool such as procmail. Procmail is a basic email filter and not nearly as difficult to set up as people imagine. Let's run through the setup and focus on a couple potential stumbling blocks. http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/81833/easy-email-filtering-procmail#comments IT management/strategy Open Source How-to .forward email filtering procmail Sandra Henry-Stocker sendmail Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:13:42 -0400 Sandra Henry-Stocker 81833 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/80845/eradicating-spam-unix-service-accounts There are numerous ways to reduce the amount of spam that you receive. Good email filters can keep you from ever having to deal with the onslaught of stupid offers you never wanted to see, never mind the outright attempts to steal personal information or rope you into some type of scam. I've found that the spammers have become so desperate to increase their spam traffic deliveries that they are sending spam to system accounts such as bin and listen. Instead of trying to bounce this mail back to the senders -- which in less perverted times might have actually worked, I find it's speedier and less consuming of system resources to just pitch the mail into the bit bucket. Here's how this works. http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/80845/eradicating-spam-unix-service-accounts#comments IT management/strategy Operating systems How-to .forward /dev/null remove spam Sandra Henry-Stocker system accounts Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:25:21 -0400 Sandra Henry-Stocker 80845 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/80121/putting-text-window-title-bars In last week's post, I talked about customizing prompts to help remind your users what system they're logged into and where they are in the file system. Another useful way to help your users keep which window is which straight in their minds is to label the windows themselves. With the system name or project identifier displayed on the title bars of their windows, your users are less likely to type a command meant for system A on the command line for system B. http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/80121/putting-text-window-title-bars#comments IT management/strategy Operating systems How-to echo -ne Sandra Henry-Stocker title bar uname window label Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:59:46 -0400 Sandra Henry-Stocker 80121 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/78496/unix-holidays In honor of Eid al-Fitr -- three days that mark the end of Ramadan (a month of fasting and reflection) and my daughter's birthday, I thought I'd take a look at how Unix handles holidays. Think it doesn't? If you're using Solaris, take a look in /etc/acct for a file named "holidays". http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/78496/unix-holidays#comments IT management/strategy Operating systems How-to /etc/acct/holidays cron date holidays Sandra Henry-Stocker Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:23:46 -0400 Sandra Henry-Stocker 78496 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/networking/77826/checking-status-your-nics Sun's BigAdmin System Administration Portal provides an extremely useful tool for reporting the status of your network interface cards. Using ifconfig and a seriesof ndd (get driver parameter) and kstat (display kernal statistics) commands, the script prepares a summary of the network interface settings in table form. http://www.itworld.com/networking/77826/checking-status-your-nics#comments Networking Operating systems Best practice network interface NIC nicstatus.sh Sandra Henry-Stocker status Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:21:34 -0400 Sandra Henry-Stocker 77826 at http://www.itworld.com http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/77418/the-day-cron-stood-still I was surprised a couple days ago to notice that a cron job that was set up to move files from one system to another suddenly stopped working. Squeezing a little timefrom my other tasks to keep the files flowing to the application that needed them, I noted that I could run the script and move the files by hand. In fact, everything ran normally when I did and the files arrived at their proper destination in time to be processed and turned into useful graphs. Even so, the next day, the same thing happened again. http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/77418/the-day-cron-stood-still#comments IT management/strategy Operating systems How-to /var/cron/log cron job Sandra Henry-Stocker stops working truss Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:37:49 -0400 Sandra Henry-Stocker 77418 at http://www.itworld.com