The administration tag has no wiki summary.
24
votes
5answers
6k views
How do I run a command as the system administrator (root)
I need to run a command with administrative privileges. Someone said I should run a command as root. How do I do this?
20
votes
6answers
8k views
How do you kick a benign user off your system?
I was googling this a bit ago and noticed a couple of ways, but I'm guessing that google doesn't know all. So how do you kick users off your Linux box? also how do you go about seeing they are logged ...
15
votes
4answers
28k views
10
votes
11answers
903 views
Concern about logging in as root overrated?
For personal linux on my personal notebooks, I've usually set my environment to autologin as root even under X or lower runlevels. I've found my workflow is very pleasant and fast, without any ...
9
votes
1answer
3k views
How can I configure cgroups to fairly share resources between users?
There used to be a kernel config option called sched_user or similar under cgroups. This allowed (to my knowledge) all users to fairly share system resources. In 2.6.35 it is not available. Is there a ...
8
votes
2answers
12k views
How can I change a user's default group in Linux?
Being new to Linux administration, I'm a little confused about the following commands:
useradd
usermod
groupadd
groupmod
I've just finished reading the user administration book in the Linux/Unix ...
8
votes
4answers
359 views
What are your best practices and future plans for deploying unixoid desktops?
I have been setting up Linux desktops for a non-profit radio observatory. For me, this was the first time I had to think about "deploying" several identical machines, centralizing login, home ...
7
votes
3answers
383 views
Linux Bulk/Remote Administration
Beside our internal IT infrastructure, we've got around 500 Linux machines hosting our services for the on-line world. They are grouped in a bunch of clusters like Database A-n, Product A-n, NFS, ...
6
votes
5answers
423 views
What are the recommended ways of defending a remote *nix install from a hamfisted admin?
Once in a while (often a long while), I have a difficulty where I execute a command that completely screws up a Linux machine.
Most recently, I accidentally mounted-again the root partition (thinking ...
6
votes
3answers
1k views
What is the point of the 'operator' user?
Many un*x systems ship with a user account named 'operator'. What is the purpose of this account?
Do some systems actually make use of this account, or is this more of a historical legacy? Have you ...
6
votes
6answers
328 views
How to prevent a mistaken rm -rf for specific folders?
I think pretty much people here mistakenly 'rm -rf'ed the wrong directory, and hopefully it did not cause a huge damage.. Is there any way to prevent users from doing a similar unix horror story?? ...
6
votes
5answers
2k views
How to know if /dev/sdX is a connected USB or HDD?
How can I know if /dev/sdX is a local HDD or usb key ? best doing this without root privileges.
OK , udevadm helped a lot:
For local HDD:
udevadm info --query=all --name=sdb | grep ID_BUS
E: ...
6
votes
3answers
612 views
How to tell when a computer is idle?
I have a computer that is only used some of the time, and I was was wondering if there was a way to have it turn itself off after a period of inactivity.
Here's the tricky part, if I was just ...
5
votes
3answers
9k views
Alternatives for “lsof” command?
In many cases "lsof" is not installed on the machines that with I have to work, but the "function" of lsof would be needed very much (ex. on AIX). :\
Are there any "lsof" like applications in the ...
5
votes
5answers
318 views
Which tasks to learn and which books to read to become more skilled at Unix/Linux internals? [closed]
I recently interviewed at a major company and did well on programming questions such as:
"What is the time complexity of quicksort?
What is the opposite in C of malloc?
What is the opposite in ...
5
votes
5answers
358 views
Why is it recommended to create a group and user for some applications?
Most of the time, when installing a program from source it is recommended to create a new user and a new group and give /usr/local/<myapp> the recently created user and group ownership.
Why is ...
4
votes
1answer
364 views
What is the routing behaviour when two or more default routes?
I have two ISP at the time, connected to the same machine. I added both of them in the routing table as default. However, only one connection is used.
$ route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination ...
4
votes
2answers
132 views
Simple Templating for Config Files
I need to manage a growing set of similar-but-different ASCII files. ( It so happens that they're Apache VirtualHosts, but that's not particularly relevant. ) For each production website, the ...
4
votes
1answer
51 views
Distributing Updates to VirtualBox Images with (Bandwith) Efficency
I'm currently responsible for a lab of machines that all need to run the same virtual machines. I want to automate my current setup of distributing VirtualBox virtual machines via rsync (erasing any ...
3
votes
4answers
194 views
How do you work with old servers?
I've recently fallen into doing more work on LAMP servers, which is pretty new to me. At first it wasn't a problem migrating my preference files, but as I've grown and learned more, my preferences ...
3
votes
2answers
1k views
How to see complete list of processes in top
When I do 'top', I learn that there are many processes running out of which many are in sleep state. I need to see complete snapshot of all processes at that point. the 'top' is able to show listing ...
3
votes
2answers
1k views
How to know reason of a process going to sleep state and wake it up?
When I do 'top' , I see my perl script process in 'S' state. Is there a way to know, what is making this perl process go in sleep state and ways to wake it up? Any way to debug to give more insights ...
3
votes
1answer
633 views
How to disable root account on openSUSE?
Is there a way to disable the root account completely on openSUSE so you can administer your system like the way you would do in Ubuntu?
3
votes
1answer
114 views
How can I set a directory maximum size?
Is there an easy way to cap the size of a directory? I don't think there is but just wanted to make sure. I would like to set max directory sizes for some user home dirs as well as some other dirs, ...
3
votes
1answer
260 views
How do I add a local user to a box that uses LDAP authenticaiton?
I'm working with a box that uses LDAP for user authentication. However, I need to add a local user to run some services and I don't want non-person users junking up the LDAP directory. Does anyone ...
2
votes
3answers
142 views
How can I see which package manager is running?
I'm on Debian 6.0.5 (squeeze) and every now and then I see the following icon in the notifications area of the GNOME2 pannel: but black instead of red. It reads A package manager is working. Usually ...
2
votes
3answers
4k views
How do I add an entry to my crontab?
I am using crontab for the first time. Want to write a few very simple test cron tasks, and run them.
$crontab * * * * * echo "Hi"
doesn't produce anything.
crontab */1 * * * * echo "hi"
says ...
2
votes
4answers
272 views
How can I assign an initial/default password to a user in Linux?
I found a guide that explains how to set a user's password. I'm trying to automate it and send an e-mail to the user like:
userid created with password XYZ.
request to change the initial password.
...
2
votes
2answers
84 views
How do I check active crons?
I'm trying to hunt down a cron job (or the equivalent) which I know is running, but I can't find it in the default cron files for my system (FreeBSD / Linux / BSD). How can I tell which ones are ...
2
votes
4answers
132 views
Hardware and software inventorying
Objective
Collect hardware and software information from lab computers, respecting students' privacy.
Type of information to collect
Examples:
System memory
Bash verion
JVM version
Operating ...
2
votes
2answers
33 views
Reassign users to a single group
Right now one of our server is setup such that all users are in their own group. Is it possible to reassign them to a single group and then allow each user READ only access to other user's ...
1
vote
2answers
612 views
How to expire a password? (For inital account creation)
I've often created temporary passwords for users for my own development machine for initial id creation.
For other environments, I've seen admins have the ability to have a password show as expired ...
1
vote
3answers
2k views
CentOS 6 - nameserver entry in resolve.conf resetting after restarting network services?
In /etc/resolv.conf, I've changed the nameserver line to a new IP address. After saving and exiting, I run service network restart. I then go open /etc/resolve.conf again and see that the IP address ...
1
vote
2answers
668 views
mounting to non-empty directory, then later deleting original files
I have some unused space on my disk, and decided to use a little of it to create a separate /var partition. There might be an easier way to do this, but my idea is to
copy the existing /var ...
1
vote
3answers
106 views
How to clean up my desktop?
Now, I see that my desktop running rhel 5.6 has run out of space. Now I need to clean it up. There must be some unintentional files adding up. What I would like to be able to do is list the files in ...
1
vote
2answers
234 views
SELinux: Can I disable copying of certain files?
Please excuse me if this is too basic and you're tempted to throw an RTFM at me.
I want to prevent users from copying certain files while granting them read access to the same files. I thought this ...
1
vote
2answers
106 views
Browser-based front-end to linux
I'd like to ask if anything like this exists. A browser-based tool for looking at a Linux system, managing it, and helping newbies diagnose problems.
What I'm thinking of is something like this :
...
1
vote
1answer
71 views
Package managers for local installations under home directory [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Non-Root Package Managers
I work extensively on a remote system where I do not have admin rights. However, I am allowed to install my own binaries and programs under my ...
1
vote
1answer
218 views
How can I learn some advanced logrotate techniques?
The logrotate section in the Linux administrator's handbook is very brief. The man page is ok but lacks examples. Where can I find some more comprehensive information, examples, and best-practice ...
1
vote
1answer
168 views
Mass update of /etc/ldap.secret
I have a group of servers authenticating against an LDAP server. I would like to be able to periodically update the /etc/ldap.secret file with an updated secret. I've written a small script that reads ...
1
vote
1answer
63 views
Equivalent of newusers for groups
The newusers command is useful for adding or modifying users in bulk. Is there an equivalent command for managing groups?
1
vote
1answer
53 views
Embedding a cmap in moinmoin
I'd like to embed a cmap in a moinmoin wiki page. I generated the cmap using dia.
I then copy pasted the generated html code, modified it to point to the png image I attached to the wiki. However ...
1
vote
1answer
141 views
Rehashing /etc/shadow. Can I force NIS users to change password?
I'm currently migrating a CentOS environment to a Debian one. The users log in over the network using NIS. I was hoping to copy /etc/shadow from my old server to my new one so that we can offer ...
1
vote
0answers
108 views
Problem with NIS [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
NIS and autofs error
I have one server and one client machine.
In Server, I have configured NIS, and /home/guest/nis1 is shared through NFS. Both NFS and NIS are ...
0
votes
1answer
276 views
Need help with understanding output of ps -ef on linux
When I do ps -ef on my Linux box, I get:
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
Please help me with meaning of C,TIME.
is the TIME , the actual cpu time allocated to the process?
0
votes
1answer
46 views
Should I use useradd or adduser?
I am trying to add a new user to the system. I am confused though which command to run: useradd or adduser?
0
votes
3answers
37 views
How to limit administrative privileges to various config files?
I want one administrator to be able to edit the /etc/fstab file but one administrator to not be able to edit the fstab file.
Both administrators need access to all other administrative tasks.
Is ...
0
votes
1answer
80 views
How do I safely perform the below changes to network parameters on Solaris 10?
I need to change and test some TCP/IP network parameters on a Oracle Solaris 10 as a possible workaround for a bug in 'Oracle Hyperion EPM 11.2.1.0' in the development environment.
I am not a ...
0
votes
1answer
211 views
Smitty like solution under Linux or BSD?
Are there any solutions similar to AIX smit for Linux based OSes?
Basically this would be some kind of 'terminal menu-driver' script collection perhaps using ncurses for doing things that system ...
0
votes
2answers
34 views
How do I get a list of all enabled media in Mageia via CLI?
I have read URPMI from Mageia wiki but there seems to be no mention of how I can check the currently enabled media using urpmi command. There is urpmi.addmedia and urmpi.removemedia. So I tried doing ...
