December 14, 2011
Sometimes the hardest part of improving your productivity is being able to notice that you’re doing something sub-optimal multiple times each day. I was sitting hacking on some documents this morning when I realized that I frequently follow this usage pattern: Locate a file, using the locate command—often a Linux configuration file of some sort. [...]
Filed under: Linux, System administration | Comments (0)
July 19, 2011
How to get your IBM Lotus Domino server to send its logs to syslog.
Filed under: Domino, Linux, Ruby, System administration | Comments (0)
June 28, 2011
When you have a DB2 database which multiple people can update, sooner or later you are likely to end up with a deadlock. You’ll issue a simple query to update some data, and wait… and wait… and wait. I hit this problem this morning. It took a while to work out how to diagnose the [...]
Filed under: System administration | Comments (0)
November 30, 2010
Here’s how to get non-broken syslog output on RHEL: yum install rsyslog Modify the appropriate line of /etc/sysconfig/rsyslog to say SYSLOGD_OPTIONS=”-c3″ Insert the following two lines at the top of /etc/rsyslog.conf: $template RFC5424fmt,”<%PRI%>1 %TIMESTAMP:::date-rfc3339% %HOSTNAME% %syslogtag%%msg%\n” $ActionFileDefaultTemplate RFC5424fmt It’s probably then a good idea to disable the old syslog. You can also use rsyslog to [...]
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October 22, 2010
To get a list of all the software installed on your system, in descending order of bloatedness, with descriptions: rpm -qa –queryformat=”%10{size} %{NAME} – %{SUMMARY}\n” | sort -k1,1nr
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April 12, 2010
A script to safely and automatically remove unneeded kernels from Ubuntu systems.
Filed under: Linux, Ruby, System administration | Comments (3)
March 22, 2010
The first time you run IBM Lotus Domino server on a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) box, you get the following message: WARNING: the maximum number of file handles (ulimit -n) allowed for Domino is 1024. See Release Notes and set the allowable maximum to 20000. This message is less than ideal for a [...]
Filed under: Domino, Linux, System administration | Comments (0)
March 14, 2010
Once again, it’s time for every clock in America to be messed with. According to the most optimistic estimates from the Department of Energy, this will provide a savings of 0.03% on the country’s annual electricity consumption. According to actual measurements from a study in Australia, it’ll achieve nothing. According to an NBER study of [...]
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November 20, 2009
The worst thing about commercial Linux is RPM. I can never remember the command line incantations required for even fairly simple tasks. While yum eventually takes away the pain of applying software updates–so long as you’re not in a hurry–there are all kinds of other tasks it doesn’t handle. I therefore rely on an RPM [...]
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July 20, 2009
Default inode allocations for ext3 can be excessive, and result in a lot of wasted disk space.
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