Author Archives: theunixguy

Modem Emulation.. Fast and easy!

I have a weekness for anything that communicates via RS-232 Serial.  This is probably due to most of my youth days being in front of a computer connected via modem to the world.
Occasionally I like to access Telnet BBS to re-live my youth.  Telnet works fine, but once you want to start doing file transfers, [...]

BFTP: Back in the day….

Here is a little blast from the past for me.
Looking through my ~/bin directory, which is a collection of some of the scripts I’ve written going back to the wee days of me playing with UNIX.
I found this script, named “findjosh”.
#!/bin/sh
joshsip=`lynx -dump http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~resch/ip.txt | head -3 | tail -1`
case $? in
0) echo “Josh’s IP Address [...]

Simple Load Balancing with PV-Links [HPUX]

Many sites still only utilize HP’s PV-Links/Alternate-Links product to provide a simple failover for SAN connected disks. This product doesn’t do load balancing to spread out load, and is simply a failover if one of your SAN paths goes away.
This works great for redundancy, but with a little planning, you can accomplish simple [...]

Cloning a Volume Group [hpux]

Often I am asked to clone an entire Volume Group including all of the logical volumes contained.  This can be a tedius task when the Volume Group contains a hundred or so logical volumes.
This request is often used for testing software releases, deployments, etc.
I’ve use this script at least a dozen times per month, and [...]

Fixing missing devices (NO_HW) on HPUX

This last weekend, after some SAN changes, some of our HPUX systems experienced problems where either one of the hardware path’s to disk devices changed or the only path on some tape devices changed.  Of course, this wasn’t found out about until Monday morning…
A reboot would have fixed this — but I don’t like rebooting [...]

Been a little crazy lately…

About 9 months ago I started a new project… Er, maybe even could call it a hack… A good hack.   Tuesday, it was born.
I’d like to introduce the newest UNIX guy into my family…   Meet my new Son, Dexter…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/47643618@N00/sets/72157622188318531/
Born 9:28am on 9/8/9.  8 pounds, 14 ounces.  20 1/2  Inches.

A very sad day…

Today marks a very sad day.  Last night, we experienced several extended power outages.   I’m saddened to say that “Nattie”, my HP DL380 RedHat ES4 Server, finally lost power.
No, she is O.K. now, and is back up and running.  I am saddened because this server had been up for 826 days and had been a [...]

Virtual Google Search Appliances? Sweet.

A good friend of mine, Eric Lightbody works for the University of Wisconsin Green Bay as a Web Developer. He was playing with their Google Mini Search Appliance (GSA), and I was getting jealous. I had played with the earlier Google Search Appliances a few years earlier at Time Warner Cable, [...]

StorageTek 5320 Command Line Cheat Sheet

The StorageTek 5320 NAS Appliances are pretty neat devices.  I find it necessary to utilize the command line interface (CLI) quite often. Unfortunately, the documentation for the 5320’s CLI is pretty limited — at least I couldn’t find anything in the manual talking about each command.
So, for your enjoyment, I’ve summarized each command below.  [...]

Determining if your kernel and hardware is 32bit or 64bit

I’m often asked by end-users, developers, and fellow system administrators, how to determine if the installed OS is 32bit or 64bit.   I’m also asked if the hardware is capable of 64 bit, 32 bit, or both.   Here is how to tel by OS:
HPUX
# getconf KERNEL_BITS
64
This will tell you if your currently running kernel is 64 [...]