Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 two days ago. I now have it running in my VMware VI3 test environment, and the VMware Tools install perfectly. The VM appears as OS type “Other 2.6.x Linux.” I’m using VMware Tools 41412, don’t know if that matters. If you have differing results let me know.
Taken from the Slashdot article on Linux finding homes on the desktop: “The State of Illinois recently consolidated its IT systems onto Microsoft software — and has no interest in using Linux, says Paul Campbell, director of the state’s Central Management Services department. ‘We don’t have time for science projects in state government,’ he says.” I’m all for organizations deciding to go one way or another. I’ve worked with a number of clients who had some Windows, some Solaris, some AIX, some OS/400, some z/OS, etc. The IT staff could barely keep up with everything, much less be experts in any of it. On the other hand, though, an organization should take advantage of the strengths of certain OSes. UNIXes …
Michael Bierut over at Design Observer wrote a great article about his process for designing. Rather than discussing it point for point I encourage you to just go read it. Even if you don’t work that same way it is probably useful to know more about those that do. The paragraph that really hits home for me is his truthful description of his design process: “When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for …
How to torture your system administrators: a checklist for developers. 1. Insist on using /etc/hosts instead of DNS, because it is more secure that way. 2. Run everything as root, because your application is secure. You’ve heard of no problems with it. 3. Scatter the components of your application into no less than five filesystems. 4. Demand the latest versions of libraries and languages even though the ones that ship with the OS you are on have everything you need. Newer is definitely always better. 5. Treat your database as a flat file (“select * from TABLE”). 6. Use more than one programming/scripting language for a project. 7. Store data in /tmp. 8. Insist that your application needs its own …
Want to add a “RAM disk” to your Red Hat Enterprise Linux host? If you mean an all-RAM filesystem then it’s super easy. Add this one line to your /etc/fstab: none /ramdisk tmpfs defaults,size=1024m 1 2 (tabs between the fields, like everything else in fstab) Then a “mount -a” will get it running. Obviously change size=1024m to be whatever makes sense. Probably works great on other distributions, too, just haven’t tried it.
Seth Godin has a post about answering “why?” sorts of questions, concluding with a great line: “The single most efficient (and lowest cost) technique for improving your operations is answering the why questions! You should embrace these people, not send them away.” Last week I had a customer ask me why my team has a policy to do something a certain way. My response was “you know, I know why we did it in the past, but it doesn’t make any sense now.” The simple question of “why?” prompted a policy change. I always try to answer “why” questions with a truthful answer. If I don’t know why something is the way it is I find out. I hate argument …
Are you trying to install the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager client on your 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux box? Are you getting an error like: error: Failed dependencies: libstdc++.so.5()(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.5(CXXABI_1.2)(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2)(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.5 is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386 libstdc++.so.5(CXXABI_1.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386 libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386 libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386 Do you already have compat-libstdc++-33 installed? Yeah, I did, too. Turns out you need the 32-bit compat-libstdc++-33 package. Get it with: up2date compat-libstdc++-33 –arch=i386 If this is mentioned anywhere I didn’t find it. You might end up with both 32- and 64-bit versions of that package. You can get rid of them all if you need to …
“Dude, there should be a WOOT SMTP command,” my colleague Dave IMs me. We’d been trying to diagnose why the world’s worst SMTP client doesn’t work with our SMTP server. “Oh, totally. Like instead of HELO,” I reply. “WOOT lonesysadmin.net” “250 mail.server.com Hello lonesysadmin.net [127.0.0.1] Pleased to be 0//n3d by j00”
1. If you’re on Windows find a terminal program. On Mac OS X, Linux, etc. open a terminal. 2. Set your terminal colors to green on black. 3. Click the maximize button. 4. Run nano, pico, vi, emacs, whatever. If I see another raving review, blog post (especially Lifehacker), or story about how revolutionary Darkroom, Writeroom, JDarkRoom, or Writer is I think I’m going to explode. I know, I know, Mac users thought of this which means it’s the bomb and all. Pay no attention to the UNIX guys who have been doing it for thirty years… Also, I love how everybody ripped Hog Bay Software off. Apparently Web 2.0 doesn’t include Lawyers 2.0 yet.
Have you ever noticed how your OpenSSH session hangs on logout if you start something in the background? This is intentional on the part of the OpenSSH developers, but it’s annoying for system administrators who do a lot of backgrounding of things. Certainly you can force-quit your hung SSH session with the “~.” trick but that sucks, too. A quick fix I use is the ‘at’ command. In this example I want to start the Tivoli Storage Manager client daemon in the background: echo “/opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsmc schedule > /dev/null” | /usr/bin/at now Customize as necessary, but you see the trick. You do need the atd daemon running to get it to work.
