Exclude Packages From Rug Update

Use additional rug features.

rug lock-add *kernel* prevents any kernel updates.

S.M.A.R.T resources

Smartmontools for SCSI devices

Monitoring Hard Drive Health on Linux with smartmontools (a nice blog entry)

And then there's man page

Init Script Templates

RHEL: /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysvinitfiles

SLES: /etc/init.d/skeleton

Myri10ge under SLES 10

A mysterious kernel update happened on my SLES server, maybe I was not paying enough attention when saying "yes" to "rug update". It would have gone unnoticed for a long time if I were not just reading /var/log/messages for entertainment. I'm really unhappy to have a running kernel quietly overwritten under me, even if it's somewhat my fault. The new kernel broke the 10GigE interface, which real sysadmins helped to fix when I just installed SLES 10. Here are steps to bring things back to normal:

	rmmod myri10ge
	lsmod | grep myr10ge
	download, build and install the latest driver from Myricom
	modprobe myri10ge
	modinfo myri10ge
	ethtool eth2

At least this time I didn't need to have /etc/sysconfig/kernel modified with MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="myri10ge" to make it load automatically on boot.

To Play a Storage Sysadmin

Create a large partition on Linux

LVM HOWTO, especially how to setup striping. Or use the fancy GUI of system-config-lvm.

XFS FAQ.
Enable additional file system support in RHEL, a very nice guide considered by others.

Some discussions on LVM vs. RAID, and Partition Alignment.

Benchmark with iozone.

Bad Script Interpreter

I ran into the exact same problem with python today as described in this blog post.

In short, if a shell barks at the interpreter line like "#!/usr/bin/python" in your script while the path is absolutely correct, try run "dos2unix" on the source file.

I am a PC and I'm 4 and a half.

Linux Shell Meets Java UID

Java Unique ID generator (java.rmi.server.UID().toString()) can come in handy when needing unique directory names. However some basic Linux shell commands like ls, cd, rm, etc. may not like the "-" part in directory names like "-2374f8d0", Either "ls ./-2374f8d0" or "rm -- -2374f8d0" can do the trick.