I have already written about tentakel tool and shell script hack to run a single command on multiple Linux / UNIX / BSD server. This is useful to save time and run UNIX commands on multiple machines. Linux.com has published an article about a new and better tool called pssh:

Recently I come across a nice little nifty tool called pssh to run a single command on multiple Linux / UNIX / BSD servers. You can easily increase your productivy with this SSH tool.

If you want to increase your productivity with SSH, you can try a tool that lets you run commands on more than one remote machine at the same time. Parallel ssh, Cluster SSH, and ClusterIt let you specify commands in a single terminal window and send them to a collection of remote machines where they can be executed.

Read more about pssh here.

UNIX or UNIX like operating system offers many flavors. Most Microsoft users are stuck with Windows NT / 2003 only. However, UNIX users can select a variety of UNIX like oses:
+ HP-UX
+ Linux ( Red Hat / Debian / Suse and other distros)
+ Solaris / OpenSolaris
+ AIX
+ BSD (FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD) etc

Few years back I used work at largest ISP in India and our team used to mange an average 8 operating systems to support our enterprise grade customers. It was headache for me as I had to document, patch and monitor each operating system. These days I recommend selecting one operating system, which may result into saving time and money. But, how do you select perfect UNIX operating system for your business? You should always consider following factors while selecting UNIX like oses:

Ease of use – Must be easy to use.

Reliability & Stability – OS must be stable to run your business and should work under heavy loads.

Budget – No one has unlimited budget or luxury to select fancy stuff. Evaluate pricing based upon your own IT budget.

Hardware / driver support – Does UNIX hardware vendor offer good support?

Application support – Does it run Oracle or ERP software? Make sure all software compatible with os.

Vendor support – Does UNIX vendor offer good support? Does that includes phone support or email support or onsite support?

Security features – Look for security features and past security track record

Addon features – Look for bundled features such as backup utility or special software. Can you modify kernel? Can filesystem hold millions of tiny files and so on.

Expertise – How much experience and expertise you have on staff to manage OS.

Scalability – Will OS scale with your business? How does OS scale when the business grows? Watch out for clustering and HA support.

OS market share – Find out if OS dominates market. A massive user base means good support and lots of skilled workers.

Community support – The best support can come from newsgroup, forums or mailing list.

Patch management – Are patches available immediately? Find out more about security disclosure policy.

Staff training and certification support.

If in doubt, ask other people or admins – Talk to your users and find their requirements. Ask to other admins or people about the requirements rather than vendor. People using UNIX oses for a long time have practical knowledge of many things and they may able to provide guideline.

Good news and great contribution from HP. You can study all those advanced features for academic project.

AdvFS is a file system that was developed by Digital Equipment Corp and continues to be part of HP’s
Tru64 operating system. It offers many advanced features. Continuing its efforts to advance customer adoption of Linux, HP today announced the contribution of its Tru64 UNIX Advanced File System (AdvFS) source code to the open source community. The code on this site is licensed under the GPLv2 to be compatible with the Linux kernel.

The AdvFS source code includes capabilities that increase uptime, enhance security and help ensure maximum performance of Linux file systems. HP will contribute the code as a reference implementation of an enterprise Linux file system under the terms of General Public License Version 2 for compatibility with the Linux kernel, as well as provide design documentation, test suites and engineering resources.

• Download Tru64 UNIX Advanced File System (AdvFS) Source Code.
• Press Release: HP Contributes Source Code to Open Source Community to Advance Adoption of Linux

Now the million dollar question – Is there any reason to pick AdvFS fs over any of the other 20+ file systems such as XFS/ext2/ext3 under Linux?

Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a hardware level interface specification that defines a common, abstracted, message-based interface to platform monitoring and control functions. Both IPMI and KVM over IP can be used in emergency situations.
[continue reading…]

Under Linux / UNIX you use lp command to print files from command prompt. lp is quite useful when GUI is not installed on Linux box to print files. The lp command is simply a front end command that calls the lpr command with appropriate options. Its main use is to allow the running of precompiled binary programs and scripts that assume that the lp command is the official printing command.

Changing papa size is very easy under GUI environment. But how do you change paper size under command prompt?
By default lp print to A4 paper size. However sometime you need to print to different paper size from command prompt such as A3 or A5. To print to A3 size, enter:
$ lp -o media=A3 /path/to/file
Where,

• -o media=size : Sets the page size to size. Most printers support at least the size names “a4”, “letter”, and “legal”.

Other useful examples

Print a double-sided legal document to a printer called “hpljf2”:
$ lp -d hpljf2 -o media=legal -o sides=two-sided-long-edge /path/to/file
Print an image across 4 pages using a printer called “epd2”:
$ lp -d epd2 -o scaling=200 filename
Print a text file with 12 characters per inch, 8 lines per inch, and a 1 inch left margin to a printer called “lpodc2”:
$ lp -d lpodc2 -o cpi=12 -o lpi=8 -o page-left=72 ~/info.txt

To know more about lp option, enter:
$ man lp

Please note that you need to configure print using CUPS configuration file /etc/cups/cupsd.conf or web based tool located at http://localhost:631/

(Fig 01: My CUPS Configuration, showing HP PhotoSmart Printer )

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), is the largest stock exchange in the world. NYSE wants to move away from proprietary platforms, so they selected HP hardware with Linux.

NYSE is investing heavily in x86-based Linux systems and blade servers as it builds out the NYSE Hybrid Market trading system that it launched last year. Flexibility and lower cost are among the goals. But one of the things that NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow says he most wants from the new computing architecture is technology independence. The NYSE has installed about 200 of HP’s ProLiant DL585 four-processor servers and 400 of its ProLiant BL685c blades, all running Linux and based on dual-core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

=> New York Stock Exchange Moves to Linux (Image credit: Wikipedia)

dd command is all in one tool to Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the options. Since Linux (and other UNIX versions) understand everything as a file dd works like wonders. Please note dd is not created specifically for a backup purpose but it is real handy tool. Few months back I was new to HP-UX and I was unable to understand the HP-UX tape devices then I used dd to create backup. Later when I got information of tape device name I switched to age old tar and other dump commands

dd command syntax

The syntax of dd is as follows:

dd if=INPUT-FILE-NAME of=OUTPUT-FILE-NAME

dd command examples

So to backup /dev/hda3 under Linux command should be as follows i.e. linux filesystem backup with dd:
# dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/backup/myhostname-15-nov-05-hda3.bak.dd
However if you are running planning to run dd in background and if you wish to kill it or want to sending a SIGUSR1 single to a running dd process then you need to start dd as follows (this is really useful stuff):
# dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/backup/myhostname-15-nov-05-hda3.bak.dd; dpid=$!
Now use kill command as follows:
# kill -USR1 $dpid; sleep 5; kill $dpid

dd command to backup boot loader / MBR

dd can be use to backup your boot loader too (if you install a Windows after Linux it will destroy grub/lilo boot loader):
# dd if=/dev/hdX of=/backup/mbr.bak bs=512 count=1
You can restore MBR with the following dd command:
# dd if=/backup/mbr.bak of=/dev/hdX bs=512 count=1
Note replace hdX with your actual device name. However I prefer to use grub-install.

Please note that dd is also capable of reading tapes that were created on other UNIX or written in a format other than Unix (like Windows 2000 server).

Here is one more practical example for Solaris UNIX:

To copy all but the label from disk to tape i.e. copy data in 512 KiB blocks between a disk and a tape, but do not save or restore:
# (dd bs=4k skip=1 count=0 && dd bs=512k) </dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s2 >/dev/rmt/0
Copy from tape back to disk, but leave the disk label alone (restore):
# (dd bs=4k seek=1 count=0 && dd bs=512k) < /dev/rmt/0 >/dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s2

Backing up entire disk/partition with dd command

Backup /dev/hda to /dev/hdb:
# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb conv=noerror,sync
Where,

• /dev/hda: Source disk
• /dev/hdb: Target disk
• sync: Use synchronized I/O for data and metadata
• noerror: Continue copy operation after read errors

Above command will only work if the both disks are the same size and C/H/S geometry. I strongly suggest using partition level backup. dd is an easy to use (real life saver) command. Read the man page of dd for more information.
$ man dd

You can use route command to configure routing. Syntax is as follows:
route add net {network-address} netmask {subnet} {router-address}

Let us assume your router address is 192.168.1.254 and network ID is 192.168.1.0/24, then you can type route command as follows:
# route add net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.254

OR

To add a default route:
# route add default 192.168.1.254

Verify that (display) routing table is updated (display routing table):
# netstat -nr

Test it i.e. try to ping or send nslookup request:
# ping mycorp.com

To flush all routing entries use command [quite handy to clean your gordian knot ;)] :
# route -f

However if I reboot HPUX box then above routing entries gets removed. To pick up your setting upon each reboot your need to configure Routes in HPUX networking configuration file – /etc/rc.config.d/netconf. To add default router/gateway 192.168.1.254:
# vi /etc/rc.config.d/netconf

Add or modify following entries

ROUTE_DESTINATION[0]="default"
ROUTE_MASK[0]=""
ROUTE_GATEWAY[0]="192.168.1.254"
ROUTE_COUNT[0]="1"
ROUTE_ARGS[0]=""

Reboot HP-UX system/server to take effect
# shutdown -ry 0

Recently one of our HP-UX servers went down and it needed recovery. Since I’m new to HP UX one of our senior UNIX admin pointed me that they have a system recovery tape. After going through our internal docs and other resources, I was able to recover system 🙂

Here is what I did…

First I had put recovery tape into the tape driver

As soon as system started (auto boot) I had to interrupt the autoboot sequence (press ESC key) and load tape into driver
Next I had type ‘search ipl‘ command so that it will search for my recovery tape driver
> search ipl

It will give output of different devices such as Random access media, look for Sequential Access Media (and its path number or hw path).
Here is what I typed to boot from tape (in my system

> boot 8/16/5.0
OR
> boot p2

Replace 8/16/5.0 or p2 with your actual tape drive h/w path. Once booting started, it will automatically restore it.

It took almost an hour to recover but it did the job. This tape made my system bootable. Next task was to restore all data from full and incremental backup and install needed additional software. I had typed following command on HP-UX box to restore all files and directory:

# frecover –f /dev/rmt/0m –rv

This emergency came around 5pm evening last Friday. I was just closing for that day and I was about to go home. I had spent 4 hours to restore box and other stuff.

Well good news it that my diwali holidays starts from coming Friday and it will lasted until November 7, 2005 :). I really need a break guys :D.