All systems related posts
On the fly saving of few useful (?) tech tips
Sakana.fr – A sysadmin's blog
This work by Stephane KATTOOR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Category: Systems
Linux : Encrypted LVM quick and easy howto -
April 17, 2012 by
Stephane Kattoor
The goal of this tutorial is to show you how to create an encrypted LVM on Linux. This will help you keep your data safe in the event of, for example, your laptop computer being stolen.
OpenBSD : Read only Compact Flash installation -
March 11, 2012 by
Stephane Kattoor
Here are a couple of pointers to perform an installation of OpenBSD on a media which will be read-only most of the times. I hope I didn’t forget anything otherwise I’ll be in trouble next time I reinstall… 
Unix 101 : Shell wildcards expansion, to quote or not to quote -
March 11, 2012 by
Stephane Kattoor
Or why you usually use ls -l *txt without quotes, but use quotes in find . -name "*txt".
Unix 101 : Showing non-printing characters in text files (ex : DOS files) -
January 7, 2011 by
Stephane Kattoor
A non-printing character is a character which won’t actually get directly printed (or displayed) but rather interpreted. Such non-printing characters are for example line-feed or tabulation. The interpretation of those characters can differ from one system to the next. For example the line-feed character is different on Unix or DOS.
If you need an easy way to confirm that a text file is DOS or UNIX formatted (they differ with respect to the end of line character(s) for example) or if you wish to display normally non-printing characters of a text file, you can use the -vET command line switches of the cat utility.
As explained in the man page :
- -v : will use the ^ and M- notation for control and multibytes characters
- -E : will make ends of lines visible
- -T : will make tabulations visible
For example : read this entry »
Unix 101 : Filesystem basics & Special files -
December 8, 2010 by
Stephane Kattoor
This post is meant to clarify a few key concepts about Unix filesystems such as directory permissions, hardlinks and symlinks.
Linux + Xorg : Remapping caps lock key to escape -
November 12, 2010 by
Stephane Kattoor
In this post I’ll revisit the classical “how to remap caps lock into something useful” once again. In this post, I’ll show how to remap the caps lock key to have an extra Escape key, which is very useful for all VI/Vim users.
Bash / zsh : Using the history expansion -
March 28, 2010 by
Stephane Kattoor
One of the features of bash I’ve too long overlooked is its history expansion. In this post I’ll show a few examples to get a grip at it.
read this entry »
AIX : Use sar to check cpu usage -
January 30, 2010 by
Stephane Kattoor
If you’re looking for CPU usage statistics and system performance on IBM AIX, sar might just be the tool your looking for. It’ll display information for 5 minutes intervals from midnight to current time. The output looks like this :
read this entry »
Linux / Unix : Disk usage and identifying biggest files -
January 17, 2010 by
Stephane Kattoor
When working as a systems administrator, you’ll always end up having to solve a file system full error in a hurry. Here are a few commands and hints to help you get out of it quickly on a UNIX like system.
read this entry »
Gentoo Linux / Portage : How to know which package provided an installed file -
December 3, 2009 by
Stephane Kattoor
If there’s a file installed on your disk for which you’d like to know what package provided it, you can use the equery command like below :
read this entry »
