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, [...]
Category Archives: Tips and Tricks
Modem Emulation.. Fast and easy!
January 15, 2010 – 5:30 pm
Simple Load Balancing with PV-Links [HPUX]
December 18, 2009 – 5:15 am
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]
December 17, 2009 – 8:30 pm
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
September 15, 2009 – 5:53 am
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 [...]
StorageTek 5320 Command Line Cheat Sheet
July 7, 2009 – 5:01 pm
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
June 13, 2009 – 11:07 am
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 [...]
Windows Services for UNIX
April 16, 2009 – 5:40 pm
This is not a Windows blog. However, I wanted to mention a Microsoft product called Windows Services for UNIX. This is a Windows Add-on that provides some UNIX interoperability.
It provides things like; Password Syncronization between Windows and UNIX, a Telnet Server, Remote Shell execution Services, a NFS Server, a NFS Client, and more.
I’ve only used [...]
VirtualBox
April 7, 2009 – 5:35 am
I know Sun’s VirtualBox has been out for awhile now. However, when it came out, I already have VMware running and had plenty of VMs operational. Recently, I upgraded to a new workstation and switched OSes. Instead of going with VMware, I tried VirtualBox.
To be frank, I love it.
Other than a few quirks, it works [...]
Renaming files with spaces to dashes
March 21, 2009 – 9:36 am
I was just playing with some old disk images of SCO Xenix to try to get it to boot in an emulator. It was quite frustrating that all of the disk images had spaces in the file names. A few files would have been ok, but I have multiple version of multiple releases for multiple [...]