Blogging All About BSDs

The nature of FreeBSD is so rock-solid stable that some system administrator adopt the philosophy “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”, others, beg to differ. Upgrading & patching of servers should be diligently carry out so that security vulnerabilities are minimize to the least (who can be sure of their servers are 100% secure [...]

Hard disk are getting bigger and bigger. Network interface card (NIC) and switch are getting cheaper and cheaper. It usually means more services can squeeze into a server. Combining multiple network interface into 1 big pipe would be a big plus for services that is bandwidth hungry. e.g. file server, email server & etc Combining 2 [...]

Storage are getting cheaper and cheaper. Almost a year ago, a 250 GB 2.5″ portable hard disk would cost 120 bucks. But now, it only cost 100 bucks for a 500 GB hard disk. Size are getting bigger and bigger with the same monetary value but does the hard disk spins fast enough to fetch [...]

PostgreSQL is an open source RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System) that is not only feature rich, fast and light but also easy to use. Its documentation available at its website is a superb way of learning as well. Browsing the documentation and you will find that its way of explaining is no “bullshit” approach, short [...]

The usual root account are meant for critical task, such as single user mode related operation. It hails the power of the system, as well the power of destruction (try “rm -rf /” :p). That’s the reason why a lot of company have a policy to seal the root account or make some red tape [...]

As an BSD & Linux administrator, the command line is where we live. We eat, live & shit at the same place, command line screen. Some times, we can only afford to open a single terminal screen. It’s kind of hard for us to be efficient as most of the time we multitask on a [...]

The below error was display while trying to ssh or scp to a ssh server : @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ The RSA host key for domain-name.com has changed, and the key for the according IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is unknown. This could [...]

Other then digging /etc/passwd, there are other ways to check a user’s profile on the server. “finger” can also do the same job. e.g. finger username Arrivederci !!!

When organizing files, we often need to make a whole set of directories in order organize the files properly into directories. Most of the time, we will need to make a bunch of sub directories. e.g. “cd /directory” then “mkdir leve1“, then “cd /directory/level1” then “mkdir level2“, then “cd /directory/level1/level2” then “mkdir level3” and etc… In fact, [...]

Route table are part of the area to troubleshoot when a connection have problem. Route table can the the most frequent problem to look at after assigning an IP address. Other times, it is mainly for adding additional routes when wireless & wired connection are both in use. This post will attempt to list out [...]

In Linux & FreeBSD, often we need to cd to a directory then ls to find out the files in that directory. Then only to find out we need to go back to the previous directory and do something else, and we will need to type “cd /very/long/directory/name/and/it/is/just/so/not/cool/to/do/“. Next time, use : cd - and it will go [...]

By default, grep does not highlight the keyword or the search term. Making grep highlighting the search term can make the visibility of the keyword more obvious if it hide in between the words. The parameter for grep to highlight the keyword is “–color“. #start of somefile the big brown fox jumped over the lazy dog the big brown [...]

In bash script, it is common to name files with date part of it. e.g. system-20080808.zip, mysql-20070707.tar.gz, somelog-20090101.tar.bz2 and etc … Reason to name it in such a ways is easier to clean up the backup later, using bash script. If you have not notice, when listing of the files and sort it by name, it is automatically [...]

Previously, we have talk about how to assigh dynamic IP to an interface on Freebsd. This post is about how to assign fixed or static IP to an interface on Freebsd. Below are the steps : Manually assign fixed IP : ifconfig bce0 inet <IP address> netmask <subnet mask> route add default <gateway IP address> /etc/netstart e.g. ifconfig bce0 inet

(Read more...)

After accidentally cat a tar or zip file or left out some pipe and echo the whole file of random string, on to the screen; it can mess up the font of the screen and result in missing of characters or blinking characters or ever the cursor is missing from the screen. No worries, just [...]