If you are using hot swappable hard disk and created new partition using fdisk then you need to reboot Linux based system to get partition recognized. Without reboot you will NOT able to create filesystem on your newly created or modified partitions with the mke2fs command.
However with partprobe command you should able to create a new file system without rebooting the box. It is a program that informs the operating system kernel of partition table changes, by requesting that the operating system re-read the partition table.
It happens many times. Often new Linux system administrators and user(s) get confused. They are not able to determine if Linux system can run a 64 bit kernel version (and application) or not. There is simple way to find out: (a) Ask your hardware vendor (b) Find out yourself by reading manuals (c) Or run [...]
Reading an IP address in shell script required many time. However, different Linux distribution stores IP address in different files. If you are looking to run script under different UNIX like OSes such as Solaris or FreeBSD then you need to use the ifconfig command. The ifconfig command is not just used to configure a network interface, but it can be use to obtained information such as network IP, netmask and much more.
Most of the time GUI is not available on remote Linux system, you login over ssh and start to work, if you need to run two or three task at a time, you login over ssh two or three times. However, with screen windows manager utility you can run multiple terminals at the same time from single console login over ssh session (UNIX guru uses the term called multiplexing for this concept). Any seasoned Linux admin should be aware of this nifty tool :)
A question from my email bag:
How do changing run levels affect us or our users?
Linux kernel includes magic system request keys. It was originally developed for kernel hackers. However, you can use this hack to reboot, shutdown or halt computer safely (remember safe reboot/shutdown == flush filesystem buffers and unmount file system and then reboot so that data loss can be avoided). This is quite useful when Linux based [...]
