Many distributions of Linux have an option to install MySQL. In this case, or even if you compile MySQL, the default password is blank. MySQL can also run on Windows boxes. When you install MySQL, make sure that you set the root password. You can do this: root@u-1:/home/u-1# mysql -u root mysql Reading table information […]
Changing the root password on MySQL
Using phpMyAdmin to Administer MySQL on Red Hat 8.0
One excellent MySQL administration tool is phpMyAdmin. The installation is straightforward, just extract and follow Documentation.txt. One gotcha is that it requires an Apache server with php support, and MySQL, of course. It is fairly easy to install Apache and MySQL, but getting everything installed in the right order to run a PHP web site […]
Using Perl With MySQL
To communicate with MySQL via Perl, use the DBI and DBD-MySQL modules. With Red Hat 8.0, just install perl-DBD-MySQL-2.1017-3 and perl-DBI-1.30-1 off of the CDs. Why would you want to do such a thing? Well, say you had a tab delimited text file: sam 33 red sarah 32 blue ed 23 black russell 13 yellow […]
Using Arkeia for Linux Backup
If you have a single Linux file server that you want to back up, and maybe a client or two, you can use the full featured Arkeia for free. This is particularly useful for home use, or if you are migrating to Linux in your shop and wish to just back up one server. Arkeia […]
Cloning Hard Drives with GNU/Linux
It is quite easy to clone identical hard drives using the dd command on GNU/Linux. Make sure that you put the source drive and destination drive in the system so that they don’t affect the boot. If you have a SCSI system, this is most likely done by making the SCSI IDs higher. With IDE, […]
Mirroring a Website Using rsync
If you would like to mirror a website, or any part of a filesystem over the Internet, you can use rsync over ssh. Here is an example: [opt]# rsync -e ssh -avz root@website.com:/opt/webroot /opt/ root@website.com’s password: receiving file list … done webroot/logs/web1.access webroot/logs/web2.access webroot/logs/web3.access webroot/logs/web4.access wrote 156644 bytes read 345589 bytes 3475.66 bytes/sec total size […]
Using Dump to Migrate Hard Disks
One method to move filesystems around, particularly if you are moving your root filesystem, is to use dump. Dump is a lower level backup program than tar, but this also makes dump quicker, because it doesn’t have all of the overhead. Another advantage is that depth of directories, symlinks, etc. aren’t a big deal. In […]
Bull-Headed Booting
One handy tool for booting linux systems and mounting the root partition is Loadlin. Now, Loadlin is *really* old, but there have been many times it has saved our sorry arses. You can get loadlin here. Loadlin needs some kind of *DOS on the floppy to boot from. MS-DOS 6.22 works fine; however, if you […]
Nightly Mirroring via Rsync
In this article we showed how to use rsync to mirror a website. Well, rsync can also be used to provide a lukewarm recovery system. On this workstation, the root filesystem is on /dev/hda3, and we will mirror it to /dev/sda3, which we have mounted on /mnt. If you don’t have rsync, grab rsync from […]
Creating an NT boot disk
NT gets a BSOD when you sneeze at the drivers/config. We have to do some upgrades on some NT boxes, but, first, we need to make sure we can recover from a system that can’t boot. This site started out with NT (cough… ntadmintools.com), but it has been a long time. Many Linux and Windows […]
Using the Windows 2000 Recovery Console to Fix NT
In this article, we created a boot disk that could recover from a rename of ntldr. Well, what if you needed access to other files on the NTFS file system to recover. It would be nice if you could use something like the Windows 2000 Recovery Console to fix the filesystem. Well, guess what? You […]
Using Last Known Good Configuration To Restore an NT System
In this article we used the Windows 2000 recovery console to fix the filesystem on an NT server. Let’s use the recovery console to make a BSOD. We’ll just disable a required boot service: Let’s reboot: Nice!! That is what we wanted. Now, we could boot again and fix with the recovery console: That works […]
Checking the Root Filesystem without Rebooting
I’m not making any guarantees about this or even recommending it, but this is a procedure you can use to fsck a Linux root filesystem in a situation where a reboot is impossible but you suspect filesystem corruption. Example: Remote web server suspected of having filesystem corruption. Can be taken out of service for maintenance […]
Power Management Console
We are creating a lab of 16 servers here at NetAdminTools.com to test various configurations in a simulated enterprise environment. One of the first problems we needed to solve was remote power management. If you are running a data center, you should seriously consider a commercial product like the APC MasterSwitch. We don’t have that […]
Serial Port Multiplexer
As we mentioned in the Remote Power Console article, we have a lab of 16 servers that we are using to test various configurations we will use in articles for NetAdminTools.com. We needed a way to access the consoles of the servers via a serial port, but we didn’t want to plunk down $500 or […]
Aliases & Functions in Bash
You might save some time and have a little fun by putting some aliases and functions in your .bashrc file. You can put functions or aliases in .bash_profile or .bashrc in your home directory. But by using .bashrc instead of .bash_profile, they’ll be read in not only when you log in, but whenever you start […]
Determine version of running kernel
uname -a You’ll see something like this: Linux u-1.signalq.com 2.4.6 #2 SMP Sat Jul 14 09:02:08 PDT 2001 i686 unknown
Using RPM
One task that we often do is remove rpms that are installed by default. In this example, we will find out what rpm apache uses and we will uninstall it. What we need to do is find the name of the apache package: [root@srv-3 RPMS]# rpm -qa | grep apache apache-1.3.19-5 [root@srv-3 RPMS]# So, we […]
Linux From Scratch Version 3.0 Released
For those of you who wish to learn more about how a GNU/Linux system is put together, or if you want to have more control over your GNU/Linux system, check out Linux From Scratch (LFS). The commands for building a system from scratch are provided, as well as step-by-step instructions and explanations. Simply download the […]
Automated creation of GNU/Linux systems w/ XML spec file
I’ve mentioned Linux From Scratch in previous articles. I’ve discovered another tool related to this project that rocks called ALFS, or Automatic Linux From Scratch. ALFS puts all of the specifications for compiling a linux system into an XML document and generates most of a Linux From Scratch system automatically. There are a couple of […]
