Cleaning Up Memory Usage

I noticed my Ubuntu desktop was using a rather large portion of available memory.  I usually have a lot running on my system, multiple terminals, background jobs, etc so this is nothing unusual.  Today however I noticed my system was sluggish so I started digging.  Memory use was near 100%.  I closed all of my […]

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vi & vim aids

For my quick reference. To open two files in vi/vim and edit side by side (use CTRL-W + w to switch between the files): # vim -O foo.txt bar.txt To open a file and automatically move the cursor to a particular line number (for example line 80) # vi +80 ~/.ssh/known_hosts To display line numbers along the […]

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Denyhosts Assists

Every so often a legitimate user will get blocked by deny hosts.  When this happens you can re-enable their access with these 8 simple steps (UPDATE: or use the faster version, see below): Stop DenyHosts # service denyhosts stop Remove the IP address from /etc/hosts.deny Edit /var/lib/denyhosts/hosts and remove the lines containing the IP address. […]

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Testing Database Connectivity

Working with databases and new application installations can be really fun.  Problem is, when there is a problem, everyone starts the blame game.  Nothing unusual about that, part of an administrators job is to troubleshoot and prove where the problem starts.  When dealing with external databases, there can be numerous problem, the firewall could be […]

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OCI on RHEL6

Our developers had to have OCI.  Now that I got that out of the way. 😉 We use Oracle as our DB for most applications (calm down, like you couldn’t have figured that out).  In setting up a new application server for a custom application it came to my attention that the application used oci […]

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Pain often equals Progress

It has been one of those weeks.  Not fun, to many hours worked, personal events missed, you know the kind of week I am talking about.  If not…what do you do for a living?! Despite all the pain and stress this week has resulted in Progress, an increased understanding of certain products and new ways […]

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SSH – weak ciphers and mac algorithms

A security scan turned up two SSH vulnerabilities: SSH Server CBC Mode Ciphers Enabled SSH Weak MAC Algorithms Enabled To correct this problem I changed the /etc/sshd_config file to: # default is aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,arcfour256,arcfour128, # aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc,cast128-cbc,aes192-cbc, # aes256-cbc,arcfour # you can removed the cbc ciphers by adding the line Ciphers aes128-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes256-ctr,arcfour256,arcfour128,arcfour # default is hmac-md5,hmac-sha1,hmac-ripemd160,hmac-sha1-96,hmac-md5-96 # […]

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Remember when you issued that command…?

Bash History: Display Date And Time For Each Command When working in a clustered environment where sometimes documentation gets written past, it is often helpful to know when you issued certain commands. The bash history is great except it doesn’t include a date/time stamp by default. Here is how to add one: To display the […]

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Yum that was useful!

Pardon the humor.  Just a collection of useful yum commands that are useful to have around but I don’t always remember off the top of my head.  I’ll be adding to this post over time. How to list the files installed by a yum package You will need ‘repoquery‘ which is part of ‘yum-utils‘.  If […]

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Flush This!

I came across this today and learned something new so thought I would share it here. After killing 2 processes that had hung I noticed the following in the ps output: root       373     2  0 Jun11 ?        00:00:00 [kdmflush] root       375     2  0 Jun11 ?        00:00:00 [kdmflush] root       863     2  0 Jun11 ?        00:00:00 [kdmflush] […]

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