We knew the answer to this question once, back when the world was young and full of truth. Without hesitation, we’d have spouted “Just take the output of lsof | wc -l!” And it’s true enough, in a general sort of way. But if you asked me the same question now, my answer would be: […]

Red Hat’s maintenance policy is nasty. On the one hand, they need to make money, and maintaining distributions is expensive. On the other hand, for those of us who use Red Hat in budget environments, we can’t really afford their advanced server product, and can’t afford to change to a new version every year. One […]

Check out Bruce Perens’ analysis here, and ESR’s An Open Letter to Darl McBride.

It has been awhile since we powered up the Sparc64 box we loaded Gentoo on in this article. Well, links was not on the box, and we wanted it. Emerge failed: srv-44 scsi # emerge links . . . !!! Couldn’t download links-2.1_pre2-patch.tar.bz2. Aborting. Doh! We have to emerge portage and sync it: srv-44 scsi […]

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 […]

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 […]

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: […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Did you know that you can recall the last argument to the last command you typed by using the special variable !$. This can be handy when you are working with host names, long file names, all sorts of things. A few examples: See if a host is up and log in: usr-3@srv-3 usr-3]$ ping […]

We ran into a couple of interesting problems with modules. The first one dealt with SCSI emulation with IDE drives. You need SCSI emulation if you want to write to your IDE CD-ROM with Linux tools. In the past, we have recompiled the kernel with SCSI emulation, but it is so much easier if you […]

[or… how I learned to stop worrying and love the /etc/group file] On Red Hat, the default permissions for a serial port are: ls -l /dev/ttyS1 crw-rw—- 1 root uucp This means that root is the owner and group is uucp. No others have access to the serial port. In order for a non-root user […]

In this article, we showed how to build a serial port multiplexer that allows up to 16 different servers to be controlled from one serial port. We needed to upgrade our servers to 8.0, and, of course, we wanted to use the serial port to do it rather than lug a monitor and keyboard over. […]

In this article I struggled with a Barracuda ST15150N drive that had problems with Tagged Command Queueing. Well, it is nice to have an install diskette that works with a serial console and works with the ST15150N. This article will guide you through the modification of a stock RedHat install boot disk. I will start […]