In an environment with multiple windows servers what is the best way to ensure patch compliance accross all systems? Is there a simple tool (some sort of client/server app?) that allows reports to be generated showing the status of all the systems so any that aren't automatically patching themselves can be fixed without having to manu...
What useful tips and solutions do people have for taking an office full of various systems (ranging from ancient XP boxes to modern Vista laptops, and a mac thrown in for good measure) with no central facilities or servers and fixing it up as much as possible to reduce maintainence effors from the IT support? Having a complete, rigerous...
In the spirit of being helpful, this is a problem I had and solved, so I will answer the question here. Problem I have: An application that has to be installed on on Redhat or SuSE enterprise. It has huge system requirements and requires OpenGL. It is part of a suite of tools that need to operate together on one machine. This app...
lsof is an increadibly powerful command-line utility for unix systems. It lists open files, displaying information about them. And since most everything is a file on unix systems, lsof can give sysadmins a ton of useful diagnostic data. What are some of the most common and useful ways of using lsof, and which command-line switches are u...
I'm looking for a way to change the hostname and IP address of a Windows XP system that is mounted via a loop-back image on a Linux system. So basically I have access to the Windows XP system on a file level, but I cannot execute any programs on it. A way similar to editing the /etc/hostname and whatever network configuration file under ...
I would like to trash the mail received by a single qmail alias. I don't want any mail delivery errors, and I want qmail to be happy about having delivered the mail. How can I do this, preferably without adding another local email account? ...
We are using Zabbix for services monitoring. There are some essential monitoring configured. I want to have timeline of version strings of my service along with this monitorings. That would give me opportunity to see that upgrading to this version altered overall error-count. Is it possible? ...
How can I connect a system to a network and sniff for virus/spyware related traffic? I'd like to plug in a network cable, fire up an appropriate tool sand have it scan the data for any signs of problems. I don't expect this to find everything, and this is not to prevent initial infection but to help determine if there is anything tryin...
I am putting together a Samba-based server as a Primary Domain Controller, and ran into a cute little problem that should have been solved many times over. But a number of searches did not yield a result. I need to be able to remove an existing user from an existing group with a command line script. It appears that the usermod easily ...
Using any member of the Windows Server family, I can set up an active directory, and have a single pool of users for a large scale of computers; access can be given / removed for any shared resources in the given domain (including access to client computers, etc). What similar (and widespread) solutions exist for managing a multi-user, ...
I am looking for the way to mount NTFS hard disk on FreeBSD 6.2 in read/write mode. searching google, I found that NTFS-3G can be a help. Using NTFS-3G, there is no problem when I try to mount/unmount NTFS manually: mount: ntfs-3g /dev/ad1s1 /home/admin/data -o uid=1002, or umount: umount /home/admin/data But I have a problem when ...
Is there a way to force a Samba process to close a given file without killing it? Samba opens a process for each client connection, and sometimes I see it holds open files far longer than needed. Usually i just kill the process, and the (windows) client will reopen it the next time it access the share; but sometimes it's actively readi...
Linux Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder and Trent R. Hein is the defacto for sysadmins.Any other favorites besides this one. ...
I have Apache running on a public-facing Debian server, and am a bit worried about the security of the installation. This is a machine that hosts several free-time hobby projects, so none of us who use the machine really have the time to constantly watch for upstream patches, stay aware of security issues, etc. But I would like to keep t...
I'm looking for: documentation blogs books ready-to-use pre-configured slice images services wrappers libraries tutorials ...anything that would make it easier to start using EC2 to host a Rails application. ...
I have several databases where the transaction log (.LDF) is many times larger than the database file (.MDF). What can I do to automatically shrink these or keep them from getting so large? ...
Python for Unix and Linux System Administration is aimed at sysadmins. Any other favorites besides this. ...
I need a Unix-based tool, such as a shell script or command-line program, to copy IMAP folders from one server to another. Ideally, the tool should copy all the folders for a single account (Inbox, Sent, Trash, and user-created folders) at once, rather than one folder at a time. It should preserve message dates. As an option, I'd like to...
In deploying to a new (Solaris 9) environment recently, one of the steps was to copy a set of files and directories to their new location and then to apply the group UID bit (using "chmod -R g+s") to all files in the directory tree giving a mode of -rwxr-s--- to everything. The result was that none of our shell scripts would execute unle...
Is there a way to extract an installed RPM from an RPM database on RedHat Linux to reproduce the original .rpm file? ...