Posted on in System Administration
I stumbled across this problem when a daily cronjob on one of our Debian servers complained about this. A lot. If you run across this on one of your systems, there is a quick fix.
In our case, it turned out that /usr/bin/mandb could not read /etc/passwd …
Posted on in System Administration
Thanks to an error report from one of my backup jobs, I noticed that
/Users/slap/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports was filling up with Finder crash
reports (files of the type *.crash). These files were being created once a
minute. Additionally, icons on my Desktop were blinking once a minute.
Upon …
Posted on in System Administration
I decided the other night to begin doing some testing using my headless Mac Mini. I use VirtualBox for all my testing on my Mac OS X systems. Since the Mini is headless, I decided now was as a good a time as any to start using VirtualBox via the …
Posted on in Software
I recently spent six weeks in Sydney working for my new job. Naturally, while I was there, I let Google Chrome's omnibox redirect my searches to Google Australia. Fast forward a few weeks, and I'm back in the States, but Chrome is living in the past. After trying just about …
Posted on in voice
It seems the maximum length for variables (at least those in extensions.conf) in Asterisk 1.2 is 255 characters. Running into this problem has to be uncommon, but it can really bite you if aren't aware.
Although I am only aware of this limitation in Asterisk 1.2, it …
Posted on in System Administration
On your Mac, the Brother ControlCenter software that let's you scan an image from your Brother MFC to your computer is started at boot by launchd. Therefore, it can be restarted from the command line.
For example, here is a list of processes controlled by launchd:
$ launchctl list | grep brother …Posted on in System Administration
I have a fairly lightly loaded MySQL server with a few tables that are updated every five minutes. Other than these updates, there are very few queries run against the database. The data is queried just a few times per month. Ever so often, one of the more complicated queries …
Posted on in Networking
Here are a few tips that might be helpful if you are having trouble accessing your Cisco router or switch via the web server.
aaa new-model, you will …Posted on in System Administration
Posted on in Networking
If you need to disable spanning-tree on a particular VLAN in your Cisco-based network, use the following command:
Switch(config)# no spanning-tree vlan 13
This will disable spanning-tree on unlucky VLAN 13.
If you have some good examples of why you might want to disable spanning-tree for a VLAN, please …
Posted on in System Administration
While researching a problem with our Oracle Fast Recovery Area (FRA), I took note of the more useful commands I used. This is from Oracle 11g R2 with the Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Automatic Storage Management (ASM) options.
Show how much of the FRA is in use …
Posted on in Software
After a recent power event, I experienced this problem. None of our iPods were appearing in iTunes; even those that sync via wireless. My problem was solved on the macosxhints forums by sprale.
In Terminal:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/SyncServices/
rm Local
If you aren't comfortable in Terminal, you will …
Posted on in Networking
Not everyone has a great password maintenance process. If you run into a situation where the group pre-shared keys for your VPN are lost, you face the option of changing the existing key (and breaking any users that are currently working), or creating a new group with a new key …
Posted on in System Administration
If you are unfamiliar with Oracle and setting up your vCloud Director Oracle database, don't make the same mistake I made:
SQL> CREATE TABLESPACE "CLOUD_DATA" DATAFILE "/home/oracle/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/cloud_data01.dbf" SIZE 1000M AUTOEXTEND ON ;
CREATE TABLESPACE "CLOUD_DATA" DATAFILE "/home/oracle/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/cloud_data01.dbf …Posted on in Networking
On occasion, you may need to put your Cisco IPS into bypass mode. Bypass mode allows the IPS to pass traffic without inspecting it. This may be useful if you suspect the IPS is causing a problem, if you are going to run a one-time scan that would set the …
