Articles in the system_administration category

  1. Mac OS X Not Using Search Domains

    Posted on in System Administration

    Every time I restart my OS X Mountain Lion (10.9) laptop, it stops using the DNS search domains I've added via the Network preferences pane. I have found that restarting mDNSResponder fixes this issue. There are two ways to do this.

    The first is a simple restart by sending …

  2. Finder Crashing Every Minute

    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 …

  3. OS X CLI: Install VirtualBox

    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 …

  4. Restart Brother ControlCenter

    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 …
  5. [MySQL] Stuck at copying to tmp table

    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 …

  6. Random Oracle FRA Usage Notes

    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.

    SQL*Plus

    Show how much of the FRA is in use …

  7. vCloud Director Install - ORA-00972 Error During Oracle Setup

    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 …
  8. Lion + Cisco VPN DNS Workaround

    Posted on in System Administration

    When I upgraded to OS X 10.7 (Lion), I started using the built-in IPSec VPN client rather than Cisco's VPNClient. I experienced problems immediately. At first it appeared that the connection was being made, but no traffic was passing. When I tried pinging by IP address, I found that …

  9. Mac OS X terminal and GNU screen scrollback

    Posted on in system_administration

    If you're a frequent user of GNU screen on your Mac, you are probably tired of using ctrl-a [ to enter scrollback mode. Adding the following lines to the .screenrc configuration file in your home directory in order to scroll with your mouse:

    defscrollback 5000
    termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@
    
  10. Killing Old popper Processes in Solaris 8

    Posted on in System Administration

    I've dealt with a few servers that have long lived popper (POP3) processes. These processes should be closed once the connection is closed, but they occasionally hang around. Once they get in this state, they will never close on their own. After a while, hundreds of these processes will just …

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