Articles in the system_administration category

1. Mac OS X Not Using Search Domains

   Posted on May 04, 2014 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. Puppet + Augeas: Modify Logrotate Configuration

   Posted on March 12, 2014 in System Administration

   On my web server, I keep my web sites in /var/lib/www. Each web site has a dedicated logs directory. Since logrotate is already rotating Apache logs on the server, I'd like to continue using that to rotate these log files as well. Below, is a Puppet snippet that …

3. /usr/bin/mandb: the setuid man user man does not exist

   Posted on January 06, 2014 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 …

4. Finder Crashing Every Minute

   Posted on November 05, 2013 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 …

5. OS X CLI: Install VirtualBox

   Posted on April 29, 2013 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 …

6. Restart Brother ControlCenter

   Posted on November 06, 2012 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 …

7. [MySQL] Stuck at copying to tmp table

   Posted on September 04, 2012 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 …

8. Apache Can't Use Remote MySQL Server When SELinux is Enabled

   Posted on August 20, 2012 in System Administration

   I don't know why SELinux problems seem so frustrating. The problem almost certainly is related to the fact that there is frequently no error message. This is exactly the problem I ran into while turning up a new Apache web server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL6) with SELinux …

9. Random Oracle FRA Usage Notes

   Posted on July 09, 2012 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 …

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

    Posted on June 14, 2012 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 …