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 :

This code snippet demonstrates how easy it is to collect your twitter @mentions in Perl, coupled with curl for simplicity.

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.

Sometimes automatically running scripts in production environments are simply monitored by emails. Those scripts may run on schedule or be triggered by events and they send an email (for example to the technical support level 1) upon completion of the job. The content of the email will then give information about the outcome of the execution of the script.

This posts lists a few ideas that you might find useful to implement when in such an environment.

Firefox will load whatever URL is in the copy-paste buffer in the page if you middle click somewhere on a page. My mouse’s wheel also serves as the middle button, and I found it really annoying that when occasionally middle-clicking while scrolling the page, Firefox would try to load another page …

You can control this behaviour with this about:config property middlemouse.contentLoadURL. Set to true, the middle-click on the page will load the URL (if it is one) in the page, set to false it won’t.

Finance::Quote is a Perl module which can be used to obtain stock information from various internet sources. I thought I’d rather share this code snippet as an example showing how easy it is to use, before I turn it into a bloatware with an SQL backend to compute average price per share and what not 🙂

So here is a simple snippet demonstrating how to get the price of a stock :

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 :

If you’ve got a VirtualBox VM already installed and you wish to clone/copy it, follow the steps below :

If you need to export ZFS volumes through CIFS, follow this simple step by step procedure.

In OpenSolaris, switching to the /dev development branch is a bit like switching to the testing branch for some linux distros. So you might want to think twice before doing so, as it might sometimes break things.

If you still want to do that, follow those instructions :