Beware! Make sure you have a backup of the registry and are 100% confident of the syntax of the entries before you change anything. If you mess up, your NT system may never boot again, and you will have to reinstall NT. Try to tweak the registry indirectly whenever you can through control panel/services, system […]
Services Subkey Entries
Using Strace to Determine What Files a Program Opens
We were recently configuring AIDE, and didn’t pay attention to the defaults in the configuration when we compiled it, and didn’t know where aide.db.new was going to after running aide initially. Sure, lsof would work while to porgram is running; however, we needed to know what files were open while the program was running. Strace […]
In Case of Emergency… Yodel
Your servers are all monitored with Nagios. Splunk is constantly eating your logs, hence why we’ve added some alternative to splunk here. You’ve got your EPO switch, your UPS, your temperature sensors and surveillance camera. The cables are tied up as neat as a Mouseketeer’s pigtails, remote management interfaces are quietly waiting for a server […]
Using the CACLS command
The cacls command is used to edit and display file permissions on NTFS partitions. Here is a list of the options: D:\>cacls Displays or modifies access control lists (ACLs) of files CACLS filename [/T] [/E] [/C] [/G user:perm] [/R user […]] [/P user:perm […]] [/D user […]] filename Displays ACLs. /T Changes ACLs of specified […]
Changing the Default Crontab Editor
The default crontab editor is nano on some systems. This is a pain. You can change this by setting the EDITOR environment variable. In BASH: srv-4 / # set | grep EDITOR EDITOR=/bin/nano srv-4 / # which vi /usr/bin/vi srv-4 / # export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi srv-4 / # set | grep EDITOR EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi _=EDITOR srv-4 / […]
Imagine, Express, Observe, Improve, Converge
I encourage every systems administrator, engineer, or architect to watch this. The birth of new systems is presented in three stages: bootstrapping, configuration, and command and control. These stages are analyzed with traditional procedures vs. the vision of Adam and Ezra of a better way. Bootstrapping is facilitated by cloud computing; configuration focuses on expressions […]
Our Favorite NT Registry Entries
Beware! Make sure you have a backup of the registry and are 100% confident of the syntax of the entries before you change anything. If you mess up, your NT system may never boot again, and you will have to reinstall NT. Try to tweak the registry indirectly whenever you can through control panel/services, system […]
One off Administration and Testing Scripts Using Vi
If you have a list of servers, you can use the substitution feature in vi to quickly turn that list into a test script. For instance, if I want to test a list of domains that looks like this: domain1.com domain2.com domain3.com domain4.com domain5.com I can insert text before and after the domain name. Here […]
Retrieving Group Membership for Active Directory from the Command Line
To create a list of regular users in an Active Directory group using the CLI: dsquery group domainroot -name groupname | dsget group -members | dsget user -fn -ln fn ln John Brown Bill Smith dsget succeeded
Pstools freeware from Sysinternals
One problem with upgrading software remotely is that you often need to stop the software you are upgrading first. Often, there is no service that can be stopped. The process must be killed. This can be a bit nasty with Windows systems because there is no easy way to find all instances of a particular […]
Vim With Spell Checking
There is a new version of Vim that will do spell checking. We used version 7.0131 available here. Grab the source, extract, compile, and install: [root@www src]# cd vim7 [root@www vim7]# ls vim-7.0131.zip [root@www vim7]# unzip *.zip Archive: vim-7.0131.zip Vim 7 snapshot version 7.0131 inflating: src/README.txt inflating: src/arabic.c inflating: src/arabic.h inflating: src/ascii.h inflating: src/buffer.c . […]
