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 […]

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 […]

For those of you managing GNU/Linux systems, you are certainly familiar with the wide range of filesystem heierarchies and utility locations. This makes it difficult to move between different vendors’ distributions. This is changing, in a large part due to the FHS standard. Check it out: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

Sometimes in the course of a system’s existence you find that the swap partition you set up at install-time just isn’t enough anymore. Maybe you’re upgrading your system to RedHat 7.1 from a version of RedHat that used less swap in relation to physical RAM. Perhaps you’re running Oracle. Or maybe you’re adding more memory […]

You can get it from the mirrors here: kernel.org/mirrors or here: kernel.org. Check our our article on compiling the Linux kernel. One trick we’d like to remind you of from the article is to use “make oldconfig” to migrate your old .config file (usually in /usr/src/linux). You will be asked about just the options that […]

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 […]

Before you do anything else, make sure you have a way to boot the OS.  Make a bootdisk and test it. Get the source for the kernel and put it in /usr/src. cd /usr/src tar -xzf <kernel source file name> The kernel source lives in /usr/src/linux.  Linux is usually a symbolic link to the source […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

Buoys and gulls, I’d like to introduce the lsof command. Say that you were moving a whole bunch of files, and there was no indication of what file was currently being moved? lsof shows (lists) open files. For instance, if you were moving a bunch of files from directory sales, you could see exactly what […]

We ran across an interesting problem when using our trusty loadlin boot diskette to boot one of our machines when we had a grub freakout: Uncompressing Linux… ran out of input data — System halted_ It turns out that this happens when the kernel is over 1 meg. There are a couple of options. There […]

The System V init scripts are a bear to configure by hand. We discussed using chkconfig in this article. Ksysv, part of KDE, provides an easy to use GUI interface. Just drag the services to the appropriate place. The priority number, K/S prefix, and symlinks will all be set up automatically. Backup up all of […]

I was reading Wired last night, and there was an interesting article about Torvalds. You can read the article here. There was a blurb in it about the Stallman GNU/Linux debate that bothered me. Stallman is a crank in the finest sense. This means that when he says something, it is usually true, you just […]

It is a good idea to test this and upgrade to it if you are running a 2.4 kernel. There have been some problems with virtual memory with some of the 2.4 releases. There was also a nasty bug with symlinks w/ 2.4.11. Get it from: Kernel.org Mirrors. Seems to work fine for us. We […]

Minicom is a simple terminal program. We use it to access our servers via our serial port mux. Most likely your GNU/Linux distribution has Minicom as an available package. If not, or you would rather compile yourself, grab minicom from here. Unpack the sources in your favorite spot and compile: # cd mini* [minicom-2.00.0]# ./configure […]

We have a Sony Cyber-shot model DSC-U20 camera. We had to add USB filesystem support and generic SCSI support to our kernel, but besides that, using the camera with GNU/Linux was quite easy. After your kernel is happy, just plug in your USB device and run dmesg: root@srv-1 u-1 # dmesg . . . hub.c: […]

There are two main bootloaders you can use with Linux these days: LILO and GRUB. Red Hat uses GRUB by default now. Most distributions used LILO until quite recently. We built a fairly souped up Linux workstation w/ a large Maxtor IDE drive. We decided to use Sorcerer GNU/Linux; however, we had a horrid time […]

Ever wish you could harness the power of many boxen to compile those large projects like KDE, or the LInux kernel? Well, you can, with distcc. We grabbed version 1.5, and compiled it on srv-33 and srv-34, two machines with P133 processors: # cd /usr/local/src # tar -xzf distcc*.gz # cd dist* distcc-0.15]# ./configure && […]

One problem that can get really nasty is if you update an RPM system with the wrong version of glibc. First, we need to find out what glibc RPMs are installed, and then we can determine the architecture: [root@srv-3 root]# rpm -qa | grep glibc glibc-devel-2.3.2-101 glibc-common-2.3.2-101 glibc-kernheaders-2.4-8.36 glibc-2.3.2-101 glibc-headers-2.3.2-101 [root@srv-3 root]# rpm -q –qf […]