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 […]

It has been awhile since we have purchased workstation hardware for a new system. We settled on the Asus P4B w/ a Geforce2 MX400 AGP video card. As of February 2002, it seemed like the best CPU value was a P4 1.7GHz. We are running Sorcery GNU/Linux so we can squeeze out all of the […]

If you have some old Sun hardware you would like to run GNU/Linux on, the easiest way to get started is to use the CD-ROM images available at Aurora Linux. We’ve tried many different distributions, but the only one that we could get to load successfully is Aurora. Mebbe we are braindead, but if you […]

Red Hat includes the checkconfig & service utilities to help you manage your start up scripts and save you a lot of typing. This is handy when you’re adding your own services and also in managing the already existing services. chkconfig is available if you want to use it on other distributions that may not […]

We have an old Sun box that won’t even run Solaris 8. Plus, Urbana wants to run Solaris 9 on the good Sun box, not GNU/Linux. After we optimized our system with Gentoo, we didn’t want to redo the compiles, especially on this slower box. We did a dump of the filesystem, installed Aurora on […]

In our article Serial Port Multiplexer, we documented a design for a shoestring budget console sharing device. Basically, if you have a bunch of servers that can run their consoles via a serial port, you can use our device to monitor all of these consoles remotely. Well, one of our boxes is sick, and we […]

If you are running Red Hat, you need to keep your RPMs up to date. Red Hat has a service you can subscribe to, but if you wish to do this manually, browse to the house of mirrors, and pick a site that has updates for your architecture. We put all of the updates in […]

We run Gentoo, and in our make.conf file we had CFLAGS=”-march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer”. Well, it turns out there is a bug. If you run this script: python -c ‘int(10.1); int(10000.3); int(1.2)’ You will get an overflow error. The fix is to use CFLAGS=”-march=pentium3 -mcpu=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer”. We just ran emerge glibc, and the […]

One problem with Red Hat systems is that the kernel config is not as simple as, say, Slackware. You can’t simply just select the modules you think you need, add in devices, etc. and have the system boot correctly. The Red Hat config is quite customized. This is particularly true for workstation configs that use […]

Linux From Scratch is a GNU/Linux distribution that you compile and piece together yourself. Gerard Beekmans and the LFS team have published LFS 4.1 as a book with a companion CD. We think that this is a fabulous way to document the heart of GNU/Linux. Own your own distribution. Don’t be buffeted about by corporate […]