Katwa Consulting: A single consultant specialising primarily in Sun Microsystems' Solaris System Administration. Being vendor independent Amongst other realms, Katwa Consulting can provide photography, pharmacy and music-technology consultation.
This website will highlight the latest news in Tech, Sci-Tech, IT and Telecomms news. Primarily focused on discovering relevant news from the internet, this site aims to provide a resource for UNIX administration and methodology.
Free Unix accounts and shells from most of these the services listed on Mitja Sladovic's site. Some of them give you a limited shell with a meg or few of diskspace. Others give you the full deal with lots of space. All in all, when you need a Unix presence on the internet this list has something for you.
(Intel Mac only) A 1GB drive that can boot your Mac, running the utilities of your choice. Why not? Linux and Windows users have had this feature for a while; think Live distros and BartPE for Windows.
The main reason is for troubleshooting. In the most obvious example, your Mac won't start up, boot your Mac from the 1Gb drive and run repairs. Although you could boot from your Mac OS X Install DVD and use it to run Disk Utility, but you're limited to the software on the disc. With a USB drive, you can use your own troubleshooting utilities.
Now, anyone know of a way to triple boot my USB flash drive?
Following up on our post on installing Solaris on to a Macbook. Here're two articles also from Sun employees who have successfully installed and dual-booted (and documented) Solaris on a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini.
Both these installations require an external harddisk, but one of them does NOT need Boot Camp!
Why 103? No idea. Here's a list of security applications for Windows, Linux and OSX. Some of them protect, some of them serve the public trust and some of them uphold the law.
Others don't.
VMware Server installs for: Mandriva Free 2007 | Fedora Core 6 | Debian Sarge | Ubuntu 6.06 | VMware Server
VMware Server has been free for over a year now and it's usually found in datacentres and professional environments. Katwa-Consulting looked at the prospect of using it in the home.
Consider an average family household with 2 adults and 2 children in education. At any one time, there could be 4 computers running simultaneously; not to mention the media server under the TV. The cost of 5 reasonably priced PCs and laptops could be rather expensive.
Virtualisation may help to reduce costs dramatically. In a virtualised environment, each user can use a low spec PC or laptop as a thin client and remotely access their own virtual PC running Linux, Windows or indeed any other OS supported under VMware. The server can run a local printer/file server, network proxy/filter server and run local backups (disk to disk backup, anyone?).
There are a couple of problems to this scenario. Such a server would have to have a pretty powerful processor to service 4 users and their typical loads. It'd be nice if the LAN was gigabit wired ethernet, rather than the relatively slow 802.11x wireless. But for webbrowsing, office, listening to music (with Microsoft's Remote Desktop)*, Photoshop/Gimp and most other applications this kind of environment is ideal and can save money in the long run. It'd be cheaper to upgrade the VMware server than upgrade the clients.
* but why not use a virtual media server?
Cooperative Linux is a port of the standard Linux kernel modified to run cooperatively with another operating system. The host operating system (Windows or Linux) maintains control of the physical resources of the operating system, while the guest operating system (coLinux) is provided with a virtual abstraction of the hardware.
Networking is provided to coLinux via a TUN/TAP driver. To access the GUI, use the X Window protocol (Xming) to host the display for coLinux.
Katwa-Consulting tested Mandrake 10.0 under coLinux 0.6.4 (2006.07.02) on an Intel Centrino 1.7GHz running Windows XP SP2 with no problems whatsoever. Granted that Mandrake 10 is a few years old, it worked flawlessly. On coLinux's wiki, there are tutorials and images of Fedora 5, Ubuntu 6.10, Mandriva 2007, Knoppix and Slackware. Although the version tested was nearly nearly a year old, a pre-release of version 0.7.1 (2007.03.26) is available. Overall, the software works very well and quite fast (if one takes into account the slow nature X over a network).
Good System Administration is all about simplifying an automating as much as possible. This guide by IBM illustrates a few command line optimisations that UN*X veterans tend to practice.
Make directory trees in a single swipe.
All you need is Bootcamp to natively install Solaris 10 on a Macbook. Judging by the age of the article, this would have been installed with Boot Camp 1.0. It is unknown if the more recent versions of Boot Camp would work. There's no reason why not because Boot Camp provides the necessary compatibility to boot disks not configured for EFI.
When VPN is not an option, SHH tunneling often suffices. However, there are those occasions when even a straight SSH tunnel can fail to establish; such as when both computers are behind their local firewalls. This is where reverse (or proxy) tunneling can help. Essentially, one projects an open-ended tunnel to a neutral, web-neutral computer. This proxy computer listens for incoming SSH connection and connects it to the open end; a tunnel to that tunnel.
Not only the tool of developers and application testers, the powerful makecommand can be used for a myriad of sys-admin scripting, including:
Following on from the last post, provided that one has a solid knowledge of one version of Un*x, the Un*x Rosetta stone lists the utilities required to perform a common task on another Un*x.
The site lays out the common sys admin tools and utilities such as disk inspection, system logs, NVRAM, kernel settings for (currently) 18 different flavours of Un*x.
Quite a large resource of Solaris system administration hosted and vetted by experts at Sun, this website is aimed at pooling together the Solaris community. As far as Katwa Consulting knows, this sites has been going strong for the last few years. The resources cover simple Solaris one-liners to entire solutions and whitepapers for the advanced sys admin.
Indeed, this site is an excellent resource for non-Solaris sys-admins wanting to learn how to administer Solaris.
Wubi is a very interesting method of installing Linux (Ubuntu in this case) onto your Windows PC. It configures the multiboot NTLDR in Windows to give the option of booting Ubuntu. This is presented in the same way Windows provides multiple boot options after pressing 'F8' during the first few seconds of booting Windows.
Many Linux distributions come on Live-CDs. This allows you to boot, run and experience a Linux distribution without touching your harddisk. Wubi uses that principle to boot not from a CD but from an image-file stored on the boot drive.
Katwa-Consulting will be testing to see how well this works in the following scenarios:
a) On a standard PC running Windows XP.Stay tuned. The initial results will be posted soon.
b) On a Macbook configured with Bootcamp.
c) On a Macbook running VMWareFusion Beta 2. i.e. Ubuntu nested inside a virtual machine.
To quote Dave Taylor website for his book by the above name, "... it's written both for neophytes just starting to explore more sophisticated shell scripts and for "guru" experts who already think they know all that can be done within the realm of shell scripting."
The 101 free scripts listed include text-entry parsing, validation, numerical calculations, timing, calendar, file manipulation, account manipulation and more. While Dave Taylor has written other books for MacOSX and Linux administration, he does not state the compatibility of his scripts. Remember to look in the errata section if some of the scripts don't work!
As well as being useful to most junior and intermediate developers, the Developer's Cheat Sheet could be helpful to system administrators of both u*ix and Windows. The list was compiled by the author of Fuzzy Future as an article on one of his friends' blogs. The blog never came to fruition. However, the list of links has been extremely useful and covers everything from CLI (Bash and Windows), Database administration, Web development and various Programming languages.
An update to Seagate's Momentus line of harddrives will ship in laptops in the US next month. The 5400 FDE.2 will be found in ASI's C8015. Specifications as follows:
15.4-inch displayFurther to the security, the ASI machine will feature a fingerprint reader and utilises AES hardware encryption a.k.a. DriveTrust developed by Seagate.
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile processor.
256MB Nvidia Graphics card.
1GB RAM.
DVD rewriter.
Katwa Consulting: We are a consultancy firm specialising primarily in Sun Microsystems, Solaris System Administration. Amongst other realms, Katwa Consulting can provide photography, pharmacy and music-technology consultation.
This website will highlight the latest news in Tech, Sci-Tech, IT and Telecomms news. Primarily focused on discovering relevant news from the internet, this site aims to provide a resource for UNIX administration and methodology.
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