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.

I’ve recently switched to the Gentoo Linux distribution (mostly to experiment with this Linux distro) and I don’t regret it so far. This post is about my first impressions about Gentoo.

CFEngine can do wonders to keep a cluster in shape, but it can be very useful for a single server as well. Here is a configuration sample to monitor a few common services and restart them should they fail.

When you use Linux in text mode (as opposed to with an X server), you readily have access to multiple Virtual Terminals (aka VT for short) by hitting one of your keys (if you are running a X server, you’ll need to hit simultaneously).

This lets you access one of the VTs which are initialized at boot time, but won’t let you create new ones even if your kernel configuration would allow more VTs. Furthermore, what if you want to deal with VTs from a script ?

This post covers the 3 commands which will let you control your VTs from the command line or from a script.

In this post we’ll install CFEngine on a Debian system. Debian make is really simple to install any packages, so let’s follow the “standard” package installation procedure (I’ll assume that apt is correctly setup on your system ! If you have troubles with it, let me know, I’ll write a post on this topic).

CFEngine is a configuration management engine. I’m going to write a series of short posts as I’m going to use CFEngine in a current project. Let’s start with a short description of CFEngine purpose and main features.

Cfengine is a tool which purpose is to describe what is a healthy system and how to bring it back to normal when something fails.

I won’t go into an explanation about how cfengine works, because the project webpage already has a neat tutorial and complete reference. Instead of that, I’ll explain how I used cfengine to build a fool proof Linux firewall.