Awesome Pictures of Alaska

You’ve already seen the beautiful pictures of Alaskan nature. Alaska can be so different due to its climate and location. I hope, you will like some more photos of this American state. They are really nice.

Reclaim Your Time: 20 Great Ways to Find More Free Time

Photo courtesy of nattu

“The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.” - Henry David Thoreau

Are there a hundred different things you wish you could do with your life someday — anything from exercising to meditation or yoga to writing that novel you always wished you could write to reading more to relaxing and watching the sunrise?

But perhaps you never have the time, like most people.

The truth is, we all have the same amount of time, and it’s finite and in great demand. But some of us have made the time for doing the things we love doing, and others have allowed the constant demands and pressures and responsibilities of life to dictate their days.

It’s time to move from the second group back into the first. Reclaim your time. Create the life you want and make the most of the free time you lay claim to.

It’s not hard, though it does take a little bit of effort and diligence.

Reclaiming that free time

Take my life, for example: there was a time, not too long ago, when my day was packed from morning to night, when I had meetings and long to-do lists and worked long hours and the rest of my time was filled up with social engagements and meetings for civic responsibilities. I had little time for my family, which ate me up, and little time to do the things I’ve always wanted to do.

I’ve always wanted to write, but never had the time. I’ve always wanted to exercise, but was too busy. I always wanted to travel, but who can get away? I’ve always wanted to spend time with my kids, but work comes first, right?

Wrong. I finally got smart and decided that my life is my own, to do with as I wished, and so I took a time out to decide what I really wanted my life to be like. Then I designed my life, and made a series of decisions and steps to get my life to what I wanted it to be.

Today, I wake early and exercise or spend some quiet time reading and writing. I’ve written a novel and a non-fiction book. I write this blog. I run and have finally run a marathon (two actually) and completed a triathlon. I spend afternoons and evenings and all weekends with my kids and wife.

My life is what I’ve always wanted it to be, because I designed it to be that way and worked to make that design come true.

It can be that way for you, to the extent that you’re willing to make changes. Even if you just want to free up a little time for a hobby or for doing something relaxing, you can do that.

20 Ways to Find More Free Time

Not all of these will be applicable to your life — choose the ones you can apply and give them a try:

1. Take a time out. Freeing up your time starts with taking a step back to take a good look at your life. You need to block off at least an hour. Several hours or half a day is better. A whole day would be awesome. A weekend would be even more ideal, though not necessary practical for many folks. With this block of time, take a look at your life with some perspective. Is it what you’ve always wanted? How would you get to where you’ve always wanted to be? What do you enjoy doing, but don’t have enough time to do? What things actually fill up your day? Are there things you could drop or minimize to make more time? We’ll look at some of these things in the following items, but it starts with taking a time out to think and plan.
2. Find your essentials. What is it that you love to do? Make a short list of 4-5 things. These are the things you want to make room for.
3. Find your time-wasters. What do you spend a lot of your time on that isn’t on your essential list? Take a close look at these things and really think about whether they’re necessary, or if there are ways to reduce, minimize or eliminate these things. Sometimes you do things because you assume they’re necessary, but if you give it some thought you can find ways to drop them from your life. Figure out what you do simply to waste time — maybe surfing certain sites, watching TV, talking a lot at the water cooler, etc. You’re going to want to minimize these time-wasters to make room for the more important stuff, the stuff that makes you happy and that you love to do.
4. Schedule the time. As you sit down and think about your life and what you want to do, versus what you actually do, you will be looking at ways to free up time. It’s crucial that you take a blank weekly schedule (you can just write it out on a piece of paper, or use your calendar) and assign blocks for the things you love — the stuff on your essentials list. If you want to exercise, for example, when will you do it? Put the blocks of time on your schedule, and make these blocks the most important appointments of your week. Schedule the rest of your life around these blocks.
5. Consolidate. There are many things you do, scattered throughout your day or your week, that you might be able to consolidate in order to save time. A good example is errands — instead of running one or two a day, do them all in one day to save time and gas. Another example is email, or any kind of communication — batch process your email instead of checking and reading and responding throughout the day. Same thing with meetings, paperwork, anything that you do regularly.
6. Cut out meetings. This isn’t possible for everyone, but in my experience meetings take up a lot of time to get across a little information, or to make easy decisions that could be made via email or phone. As much as you can, minimize the number of meetings you hold and attend. In some cases this might mean talking to your boss and telling her that you have other priorities, and asking to be excused. In other cases this might mean asking the people holding the meeting if you can get the info in other ways. If so, you’ve saved yourself an hour or so per meeting (sometimes more).
7. Declutter your schedule. If you have a heavily packed schedule, full of meetings and errands and tasks and projects and appointments, you’re going to want to weed it out so that it’s not so jam-packed. Find the stuff that’s not so essential and cancel them. Postpone other stuff. Leave big blank spaces in your schedule.
8. Re-think your routine. Often we get stuck in a routine that’s anything but what we really want our days to be like. Is there a better way of doing things? You’re the creator of your life — make a new routine that’s more pleasant, more optimal, more filled with things you love.
9. Cut back on email. I mentioned email in an earlier point above, regarding consolidating, but it’s such a major part of most people’s lives that it deserves special attention. How often do you check email? How much time do you spend composing emails? If you spend a major part of your work day on email, as many people do (and as I once did), you can free up a lot of time by reducing the time you spend in email. Now, this won’t work for everyone, but it can work for many people: choose 2-3 key times during the day to process your inbox to empty, and keep your responses to 5 sentences. (Read more.)
10. Learn to say no. If you say “yes” to every request, you will never have any free time. Get super protective about your time, and say “no” to everything but the essential requests. Here’s how.
11. Keep your list to 3. When you make out your daily to-do list, just list the three Most Important Tasks you want to accomplish today. Don’t make a laundry list of tasks, or you’ll fill up all your free time. By keeping your task list small, but populated only by important tasks, you ensure that you are getting the important stuff done but not overloading yourself.
12. Do your Biggest Rock first. Of the three Most Important Tasks you choose for the day, pick the biggest one, or the one you’re dreading most, and do that first. Otherwise you’ll put that off as much as possible and fill your day with less important things. Don’t allow yourself to check email until that Big Rock is taken care of. It starts your day with a sense of major accomplishment, and leaves you with a lot of free time the rest of the day, because the most important thing is already done.
13. Delegate. If you have subordinates or coworkers who can do a task or project, try to delegate it. Don’t feel like you need to do everything yourself. If necessary, spend a little time training the person to whom you’re delegating the task, but that little time spent training will pay off in a lot of time saved later. Delegating allows you to focus on the core tasks and projects you should be focusing on.
14. Cut out distractions. What is there around your workspace that distracts you from the task at hand? Sometimes it’s visual clutter, or papers lying around that call for your attention and action, or email or IM notifiers on your computer that pop up at the wrong time, or the phone, or coworkers. See if you can eliminate as many of these as possible — the more you can focus, the more effective you’ll be and the less time you’ll waste. That equals time saved for the good stuff.
15. Disconnect. The biggest of distractions, for most people, is the Internet. My most productive times are when I’m disconnected from the grid. Now, I’m not saying you need to be disconnected all the time, but if you really want to be able to effectively complete tasks, disconnect your Internet so you can really focus. Set certain times of the day for connectivity, and only connect during those periods.
16. Outsource. If you can’t delegate, see if you can outsource. With the Internet, we can connect with people from all over the world. I’ve outsourced many things, from small tasks to checking email to legal work to design and editing work and more. That allows me to focus on the things I’m best at, the things I love doing, and saves me a lot of time.
17. Make use of your mornings. I find that mornings are the absolute best times to schedule the things I really want to do. I run, read and write in the mornings — three of the four things on my Essentials List (spending time with family is the other thing on the list). Mornings are great because your day hasn’t been filled with a bunch of unscheduled, demanding, last-minute tasks that will push back those Essentials. For example, if you schedule something for late afternoon, by the time late afternoon rolls around, you might have a dozen other things newly added to your to-do list, and you’ll put off that late-afternoon Essential. Instead, schedule it for the morning, and it’ll rarely (if ever) get pushed back.
18. The Golden Right-after-work Time. Other than mornings, I find the time just after work to be an incredible time for doing Essential things. Exercise, for example, is great in the 5-o’clock hour, as is spending time with family, or doing anything else relaxing.
19. Your evenings. The time before you go to bed is also golden, as it exists every single day, and it’s usually completely yours to schedule. What do you want to do with this time? Read? Spend time with your kids? Work on a hobby you’re passionate about? Take advantage of this time.
20. Lunch breaks. If the three golden times mentioned above don’t work for you, lunch breaks are another good opportunity to schedule things. Some people like to exercise, or to take quiet times, during their lunch breaks. Others use this time to work on an important personal goal or project.

“The real problem of leisure time is how to keep others from using yours.” - Arthur Lacey

Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for admins

Learn these 10 tricks and you'll be the most powerful Linux® systems administrator in the universe...well, maybe not the universe, but you will need these tips to play in the big leagues. Learn about SSH tunnels, VNC, password recovery, console spying, and more. Examples accompany each trick, so you can duplicate them on your own systems.

The best systems administrators are set apart by their efficiency. And if an efficient systems administrator can do a task in 10 minutes that would take another mortal two hours to complete, then the efficient systems administrator should be rewarded (paid more) because the company is saving time, and time is money, right?

The trick is to prove your efficiency to management. While I won't attempt to cover that trick in this article, I will give you 10 essential gems from the lazy admin's bag of tricks. These tips will save you time—and even if you don't get paid more money to be more efficient, you'll at least have more time to play Halo.

Trick 1: Unmounting the unresponsive DVD drive

The newbie states that when he pushes the Eject button on the DVD drive of a server running a certain Redmond-based operating system, it will eject immediately. He then complains that, in most enterprise Linux servers, if a process is running in that directory, then the ejection won't happen. For too long as a Linux administrator, I would reboot the machine and get my disk on the bounce if I couldn't figure out what was running and why it wouldn't release the DVD drive. But this is ineffective.

Here's how you find the process that holds your DVD drive and eject it to your heart's content: First, simulate it. Stick a disk in your DVD drive, open up a terminal, and mount the DVD drive:

# mount /media/cdrom
# cd /media/cdrom
# while [ 1 ]; do echo "All your drives are belong to us!"; sleep 30; done

Now open up a second terminal and try to eject the DVD drive:

# eject

You'll get a message like:

umount: /media/cdrom: device is busy

Before you free it, let's find out who is using it.

# fuser /media/cdrom

You see the process was running and, indeed, it is our fault we can not eject the disk.

Now, if you are root, you can exercise your godlike powers and kill processes:

# fuser -k /media/cdrom

Boom! Just like that, freedom. Now solemnly unmount the drive:

# eject

fuser is good.

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Trick 2: Getting your screen back when it's hosed

Try this:

# cat /bin/cat

Behold! Your terminal looks like garbage. Everything you type looks like you're looking into the Matrix. What do you do?

You type reset. But wait you say, typing reset is too close to typing reboot or shutdown. Your palms start to sweat—especially if you are doing this on a production machine.

Rest assured: You can do it with the confidence that no machine will be rebooted. Go ahead, do it:

# reset

Now your screen is back to normal. This is much better than closing the window and then logging in again, especially if you just went through five machines to SSH to this machine.

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Trick 3: Collaboration with screen

David, the high-maintenance user from product engineering, calls: "I need you to help me understand why I can't compile supercode.c on these new machines you deployed."

"Fine," you say. "What machine are you on?"

David responds: " Posh." (Yes, this fictional company has named its five production servers in honor of the Spice Girls.) OK, you say. You exercise your godlike root powers and on another machine become David:

# su - david

Then you go over to posh:

# ssh posh

Once you are there, you run:

# screen -S foo

Then you holler at David:

"Hey David, run the following command on your terminal: # screen -x foo."

This will cause your and David's sessions to be joined together in the holy Linux shell. You can type or he can type, but you'll both see what the other is doing. This saves you from walking to the other floor and lets you both have equal control. The benefit is that David can watch your troubleshooting skills and see exactly how you solve problems.

At last you both see what the problem is: David's compile script hard-coded an old directory that does not exist on this new server. You mount it, recompile, solve the problem, and David goes back to work. You then go back to whatever lazy activity you were doing before.

The one caveat to this trick is that you both need to be logged in as the same user. Other cool things you can do with the screen command include having multiple windows and split screens. Read the man pages for more on that.

But I'll give you one last tip while you're in your screen session. To detach from it and leave it open, type: Ctrl-A D . (I mean, hold down the Ctrl key and strike the A key. Then push the D key.)

You can then reattach by running the screen -x foo command again.

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Trick 4: Getting back the root password

You forgot your root password. Nice work. Now you'll just have to reinstall the entire machine. Sadly enough, I've seen more than a few people do this. But it's surprisingly easy to get on the machine and change the password. This doesn't work in all cases (like if you made a GRUB password and forgot that too), but here's how you do it in a normal case with a Cent OS Linux example.

First reboot the system. When it reboots you'll come to the GRUB screen as shown in Figure 1. Move the arrow key so that you stay on this screen instead of proceeding all the way to a normal boot.

Figure 1. GRUB screen after reboot

Next, select the kernel that will boot with the arrow keys, and type E to edit the kernel line. You'll then see something like Figure 2:

Figure 2. Ready to edit the kernel line

Use the arrow key again to highlight the line that begins with kernel, and press E to edit the kernel parameters. When you get to the screen shown in Figure 3, simply append the number 1 to the arguments as shown in Figure 3:

Figure 3. Append the argument with the number 1

Then press Enter, B, and the kernel will boot up to single-user mode. Once here you can run the passwd command, changing password for user root:

sh-3.00# passwd
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully

Now you can reboot, and the machine will boot up with your new password.

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Trick 5: SSH back door

Many times I'll be at a site where I need remote support from someone who is blocked on the outside by a company firewall. Few people realize that if you can get out to the world through a firewall, then it is relatively easy to open a hole so that the world can come into you.

In its crudest form, this is called "poking a hole in the firewall." I'll call it an SSH back door. To use it, you'll need a machine on the Internet that you can use as an intermediary.

In our example, we'll call our machine blackbox.example.com. The machine behind the company firewall is called ginger. Finally, the machine that technical support is on will be called tech. Figure 4 explains how this is set up.

Figure 4. Poking a hole in the firewall

Here's how to proceed:

1. Check that what you're doing is allowed, but make sure you ask the right people. Most people will cringe that you're opening the firewall, but what they don't understand is that it is completely encrypted. Furthermore, someone would need to hack your outside machine before getting into your company. Instead, you may belong to the school of "ask-for-forgiveness-instead-of-permission." Either way, use your judgment and don't blame me if this doesn't go your way.
   
   
2. SSH from ginger to blackbox.example.com with the -R flag. I'll assume that you're the root user on ginger and that tech will need the root user ID to help you with the system. With the -R flag, you'll forward instructions of port 2222 on blackbox to port 22 on ginger. This is how you set up an SSH tunnel. Note that only SSH traffic can come into ginger: You're not putting ginger out on the Internet naked.

   You can do this with the following syntax:

   ~# ssh -R 2222:localhost:22 thedude@blackbox.example.com

   Once you are into blackbox, you just need to stay logged in. I usually enter a command like:

   thedude@blackbox:~$ while [ 1 ]; do date; sleep 300; done

   to keep the machine busy. And minimize the window.

3. Now instruct your friends at tech to SSH as thedude into blackbox without using any special SSH flags. You'll have to give them your password:

   root@tech:~# ssh thedude@blackbox.example.com .

4. Once tech is on the blackbox, they can SSH to ginger using the following command:

   thedude@blackbox:~$: ssh -p 2222 root@localhost

5. Tech will then be prompted for a password. They should enter the root password of ginger.
   
   
6. Now you and support from tech can work together and solve the problem. You may even want to use screen together! (See Trick 4.)

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Trick 6: Remote VNC session through an SSH tunnel

VNC or virtual network computing has been around a long time. I typically find myself needing to use it when the remote server has some type of graphical program that is only available on that server.

For example, suppose in Trick 5, ginger is a storage server. Many storage devices come with a GUI program to manage the storage controllers. Often these GUI management tools need a direct connection to the storage through a network that is at times kept in a private subnet. Therefore, the only way to access this GUI is to do it from ginger.

You can try SSH'ing to ginger with the -X option and launch it that way, but many times the bandwidth required is too much and you'll get frustrated waiting. VNC is a much more network-friendly tool and is readily available for nearly all operating systems.

Let's assume that the setup is the same as in Trick 5, but you want tech to be able to get VNC access instead of SSH. In this case, you'll do something similar but forward VNC ports instead. Here's what you do:

1. Start a VNC server session on ginger. This is done by running something like:

   root@ginger:~# vncserver -geometry 1024x768 -depth 24 :99

   The options tell the VNC server to start up with a resolution of 1024x768 and a pixel depth of 24 bits per pixel. If you are using a really slow connection setting, 8 may be a better option. Using :99 specifies the port the VNC server will be accessible from. The VNC protocol starts at 5900 so specifying :99 means the server is accessible from port 5999.

   When you start the session, you'll be asked to specify a password. The user ID will be the same user that you launched the VNC server from. (In our case, this is root.)

2. SSH from ginger to blackbox.example.com forwarding the port 5999 on blackbox to ginger. This is done from ginger by running the command:

   root@ginger:~# ssh -R 5999:localhost:5999 thedude@blackbox.example.com

   Once you run this command, you'll need to keep this SSH session open in order to keep the port forwarded to ginger. At this point if you were on blackbox, you could now access the VNC session on ginger by just running:

   thedude@blackbox:~$ vncviewer localhost:99

   That would forward the port through SSH to ginger. But we're interested in letting tech get VNC access to ginger. To accomplish this, you'll need another tunnel.

3. From tech, you open a tunnel via SSH to forward your port 5999 to port 5999 on blackbox. This would be done by running:

   root@tech:~# ssh -L 5999:localhost:5999 thedude@blackbox.example.com

   This time the SSH flag we used was -L, which instead of pushing 5999 to blackbox, pulled from it. Once you are in on blackbox, you'll need to leave this session open. Now you're ready to VNC from tech!

4. From tech, VNC to ginger by running the command:

   root@tech:~# vncviewer localhost:99 .

   Tech will now have a VNC session directly to ginger.

While the effort might seem like a bit much to set up, it beats flying across the country to fix the storage arrays. Also, if you practice this a few times, it becomes quite easy.

Let me add a trick to this trick: If tech was running the Windows® operating system and didn't have a command-line SSH client, then tech can run Putty. Putty can be set to forward SSH ports by looking in the options in the sidebar. If the port were 5902 instead of our example of 5999, then you would enter something like in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Putty can forward SSH ports for tunneling

If this were set up, then tech could VNC to localhost:2 just as if tech were running the Linux operating system.

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Trick 7: Checking your bandwidth

Imagine this: Company A has a storage server named ginger and it is being NFS-mounted by a client node named beckham. Company A has decided they really want to get more bandwidth out of ginger because they have lots of nodes they want to have NFS mount ginger's shared filesystem.

The most common and cheapest way to do this is to bond two Gigabit ethernet NICs together. This is cheapest because usually you have an extra on-board NIC and an extra port on your switch somewhere.

So they do this. But now the question is: How much bandwidth do they really have?

Gigabit Ethernet has a theoretical limit of 128MBps. Where does that number come from? Well,

1Gb = 1024Mb; 1024Mb/8 = 128MB; "b" = "bits," "B" = "bytes"

But what is it that we actually see, and what is a good way to measure it? One tool I suggest is iperf. You can grab iperf like this:

# wget http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf2.0/iperf-2.0.2.tar.gz

You'll need to install it on a shared filesystem that both ginger and beckham can see. or compile and install on both nodes. I'll compile it in the home directory of the bob user that is viewable on both nodes:

tar zxvf iperf*gz
cd iperf-2.0.2
./configure -prefix=/home/bob/perf
make
make install

On ginger, run:

# /home/bob/perf/bin/iperf -s -f M

This machine will act as the server and print out performance speeds in MBps.

On the beckham node, run:

# /home/bob/perf/bin/iperf -c ginger -P 4 -f M -w 256k -t 60

You'll see output in both screens telling you what the speed is. On a normal server with a Gigabit Ethernet adapter, you will probably see about 112MBps. This is normal as bandwidth is lost in the TCP stack and physical cables. By connecting two servers back-to-back, each with two bonded Ethernet cards, I got about 220MBps.

In reality, what you see with NFS on bonded networks is around 150-160MBps. Still, this gives you a good indication that your bandwidth is going to be about what you'd expect. If you see something much less, then you should check for a problem.

I recently ran into a case in which the bonding driver was used to bond two NICs that used different drivers. The performance was extremely poor, leading to about 20MBps in bandwidth, less than they would have gotten had they not bonded the Ethernet cards together!

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Trick 8: Command-line scripting and utilities

A Linux systems administrator becomes more efficient by using command-line scripting with authority. This includes crafting loops and knowing how to parse data using utilities like awk, grep, and sed. There are many cases where doing so takes fewer keystrokes and lessens the likelihood of user errors.

For example, suppose you need to generate a new /etc/hosts file for a Linux cluster that you are about to install. The long way would be to add IP addresses in vi or your favorite text editor. However, it can be done by taking the already existing /etc/hosts file and appending the following to it by running this on the command line:

# P=1; for i in $(seq -w 200); do echo "192.168.99.$P n$i"; P=$(expr $P + 1);
done >>/etc/hosts

Two hundred host names, n001 through n200, will then be created with IP addresses 192.168.99.1 through 192.168.99.200. Populating a file like this by hand runs the risk of inadvertently creating duplicate IP addresses or host names, so this is a good example of using the built-in command line to eliminate user errors. Please note that this is done in the bash shell, the default in most Linux distributions.

As another example, let's suppose you want to check that the memory size is the same in each of the compute nodes in the Linux cluster. In most cases of this sort, having a distributed or parallel shell would be the best practice, but for the sake of illustration, here's a way to do this using SSH.

Assume the SSH is set up to authenticate without a password. Then run:

# for num in $(seq -w 200); do ssh n$num free -tm | grep Mem | awk '{print $2}';
done | sort | uniq

A command line like this looks pretty terse. (It can be worse if you put regular expressions in it.) Let's pick it apart and uncover the mystery.

First you're doing a loop through 001-200. This padding with 0s in the front is done with the -w option to the seq command. Then you substitute the num variable to create the host you're going to SSH to. Once you have the target host, give the command to it. In this case, it's:

free -m | grep Mem | awk '{print $2}'

That command says to:

• Use the free command to get the memory size in megabytes.
• Take the output of that command and use grep to get the line that has the string Mem in it.
• Take that line and use awk to print the second field, which is the total memory in the node.

This operation is performed on every node.

Once you have performed the command on every node, the entire output of all 200 nodes is piped (|d) to the sort command so that all the memory values are sorted.

Finally, you eliminate duplicates with the uniq command. This command will result in one of the following cases:

• If all the nodes, n001-n200, have the same memory size, then only one number will be displayed. This is the size of memory as seen by each operating system.
• If node memory size is different, you will see several memory size values.
• Finally, if the SSH failed on a certain node, then you may see some error messages.

This command isn't perfect. If you find that a value of memory is different than what you expect, you won't know on which node it was or how many nodes there were. Another command may need to be issued for that.

What this trick does give you, though, is a fast way to check for something and quickly learn if something is wrong. This is it's real value: Speed to do a quick-and-dirty check.

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Trick 9: Spying on the console

Some software prints error messages to the console that may not necessarily show up on your SSH session. Using the vcs devices can let you examine these. From within an SSH session, run the following command on a remote server: # cat /dev/vcs1. This will show you what is on the first console. You can also look at the other virtual terminals using 2, 3, etc. If a user is typing on the remote system, you'll be able to see what he typed.

In most data farms, using a remote terminal server, KVM, or even Serial Over LAN is the best way to view this information; it also provides the additional benefit of out-of-band viewing capabilities. Using the vcs device provides a fast in-band method that may be able to save you some time from going to the machine room and looking at the console.

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Trick 10: Random system information collection

In Trick 8, you saw an example of using the command line to get information about the total memory in the system. In this trick, I'll offer up a few other methods to collect important information from the system you may need to verify, troubleshoot, or give to remote support.

First, let's gather information about the processor. This is easily done as follows:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo .

This command gives you information on the processor speed, quantity, and model. Using grep in many cases can give you the desired value.

A check that I do quite often is to ascertain the quantity of processors on the system. So, if I have purchased a dual processor quad-core server, I can run:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l .

I would then expect to see 8 as the value. If I don't, I call up the vendor and tell them to send me another processor.

Another piece of information I may require is disk information. This can be gotten with the df command. I usually add the -h flag so that I can see the output in gigabytes or megabytes. # df -h also shows how the disk was partitioned.

And to end the list, here's a way to look at the firmware of your system—a method to get the BIOS level and the firmware on the NIC.

To check the BIOS version, you can run the dmidecode command. Unfortunately, you can't easily grep for the information, so piping it is a less efficient way to do this. On my Lenovo T61 laptop, the output looks like this:

#dmidecode | less
...
BIOS Information
Vendor: LENOVO
Version: 7LET52WW (1.22 )
Release Date: 08/27/2007
...

This is much more efficient than rebooting your machine and looking at the POST output.

To examine the driver and firmware versions of your Ethernet adapter, run ethtool:

# ethtool -i eth0
driver: e1000
version: 7.3.20-k2-NAPI
firmware-version: 0.3-0

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Conclusion

There are thousands of tricks you can learn from someone's who's an expert at the command line. The best ways to learn are to:

• Work with others. Share screen sessions and watch how others work—you'll see new approaches to doing things. You may need to swallow your pride and let other people drive, but often you can learn a lot.
• Read the man pages. Seriously; reading man pages, even on commands you know like the back of your hand, can provide amazing insights. For example, did you know you can do network programming with awk?
• Solve problems. As the system administrator, you are always solving problems whether they are created by you or by others. This is called experience, and experience makes you better and more efficient.

I hope at least one of these tricks helped you learn something you didn't know. Essential tricks like these make you more efficient and add to your experience, but most importantly, tricks give you more free time to do more interesting things, like playing video games. And the best administrators are lazy because they don't like to work. They find the fastest way to do a task and finish it quickly so they can continue in their lazy pursuits.

Resources

Learn

• Read the Linux Professional Institute exam prep series on developerWorks for a solid grounding in the basics to complement these tricks.
  
  
• See "Sharing computers on a Linux (or heterogeneous) network, Part 1" (developerWorks, Dec 2001) for more discussion of SSH and VNC.
  
  
• In the developerWorks Linux zone, find more resources for Linux developers, and scan our most popular articles and tutorials.
  
  
• See all Linux tips and Linux tutorials on developerWorks.
  
  
• Stay current with developerWorks technical events and Webcasts.
  
  

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About the author

		Vallard Benincosa is a lazy Linux Certified IT professional working for the IBM Linux Clusters team. He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife and two kids.

Linux is easier to install than XP

When you buy a new PC today, unless you hunt down a Linux system or you buy a Mac, you’re pretty much stuck with Vista. Sad, but true.

So, when I had to get a new PC in a hurry, after one of my PCs went to the big bit-ranch in the sky with a fried motherboard, the one I bought, a Dell Inspiron 530S from my local Best Buy came pre-infected with Vista Home Premium. Big deal. It took me less than an hour to install Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1 on it.

As expected, everything on this 2.4GHz Intel Core2 Duo Processor E4600-powered PC ran perfectly with Mint. But, then it struck me, everyone is talking about having to buy Vista systems and then ‘downgrading’ them to XP Pro, how hard really is it to do that.? Since I had left half the 500BG SATA hard drive unpartitioned, I decided to install XP SP3 on it to see how much, if any, trouble I’d run into. The answer: a lot.

First, thanks to my Microsoft TechNet membership I could download an XP disk image, which included all the patches up to and including SP3. Many people aren’t going to be that lucky. They’ll need to install XP and then download perhaps hundreds of megabytes of patches. Boy, doesn’t that sound like a lot of fun?

If you don’t have a MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) or TechNet membership, there are two ways to approach this problem. The first is to manually slipstream the patches into an XP installation CD. You can find a good set of instructions on how to do this in Slipstreaming Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Create Bootable CD. While the article is for SP2, the same technique works for XP SP3 as well.

The other way is use nLite. This is a program that allows you to customize Windows XP and 2000. While it’s primarily so that you can set up Windows without components you don’t want, such as Internet Explorer 6, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer, or Messenger, you can also use it to create fully patched-up boot/installation CDs. I highly recommend it.

This time I didn’t need to use either one. I simply put in my newly burned XP SP3 CD and went through the usual XP installation routine. Within an hour, I was booting XP.

If this had been Linux my work would have been done. With XP, I soon discovered my job was just beginning. I soon found that XP couldn’t recognize my graphics sub-system, a totally ordinary Integrated Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) 3100; the audio system, the Realtek HD Audio chipset, or, most annoying of all, the Intel 10/100Mbps Ethernet port. How can an operating system in 2008 not recognize an Ethernet port?

Well, XP doesn’t.

Fortunately, Dell includes a CD with the full range of Windows drivers on it. With it, I was able to install the drivers for all the equipment without much trouble. Within another hour, I finally had a working XP SP3 system.

That wasn’t so bad was it? Well, here’s my problem, except for Dell, I don’t know of any vendors who ship their PCs with driver disks anymore. The usual vendor answer for when you have a driver problem is for you to go online, search down the right driver, download, and install it. Except, of course, had that been my only course of action, I would have been up the creek without a paddle because XP wasn’t capable of letting me talk to my network.

Mint, on the other hand, let me point out, had no trouble with any of my hardware. Thus Ubuntu-based Linux recognized the equipment, it set it up and let me get to work. It was Windows that proved to be a pain in the rump.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, a prominent Linux developer, is right. Linux Journal recently reported that he recently told an audience at the Ottawa Linux Symposium that “Linux supports more different types of devices than any other operating system ever has in the history of computing.”

Linux isn’t perfect that way, as Kroah-Hartman would be the first to admit. Based on what I experienced, though, Linux is much better than Windows at supporting modern hardware.

We have this illusion, that’s just because Windows works on the systems it comes pre-installed on, that Windows has great built-in driver support. No, it doesn’t. Once you move to installing Windows on a new system, you’ll quickly find that Linux, not Windows, has the better built-in hardware support.

Yes, that’s right. Linux, not Windows, is easier to install on a new PC. Just something to think about as you get ready to strip Vista off your new computer.

Nasty in Kuala Lumpur

The last time Malaysian democrat Anwar Ibrahim was prosecuted on a trumped-up sodomy charge, we wrote that the government's "crude measures will exact a heavy price in terms of lost credibility." Ten years later, Malaysia's political leaders are repeating their mistakes.

On Wednesday, Mr. Anwar was picked up by men in ski masks and hauled to police headquarters. He was interrogated for six hours, stripped and asked to supply a DNA sample -- a request he refused. He spent the night on a concrete floor without furniture and was released on bail Thursday morning. Malaysian media report that the government is exploring ways to compel Mr. Anwar to give DNA.

Mr. Anwar's accuser -- his former aide, Saiful Bukhari Azlan -- is under police protection. It's not a stretch to imagine Mr. Anwar's DNA finding its way onto his clothes as "evidence," as that's the tactic the police used back in 1998. Mr. Anwar wryly noted at a press conference that, while he was stripped, the police measured his "necessary parts." That kind of detail would be helpful in a show trial.

Ten years ago then-Deputy Prime Minister Anwar was falsely convicted of sodomy and jailed for six years. His conviction was overturned by the high court in 2004. A conviction for abuse of power stood, and Mr. Anwar did not become eligible for political office again until April. Today, he leads the political opposition and is on a path to the premiership.

The same cast of characters from 1998 are in positions of influence today. The inspector general of police, Musa Hassan, was the lead investigating officer into Mr. Anwar's 1998 case, and Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail was the lead prosecutor. Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak competed with Mr. Anwar for the leadership of the United Malays National Organization in the 1990s. Then, as now, Mr. Anwar's popularity is a threat to the deputy PM's political future.

Home Minister Syed Hamid called the arrest "not a political move," while others have suggested that Mr. Anwar has nothing to fear from a "fair" trial. Malaysia's state-run media have fallen into line, too. One headline in the New Straits Times reads: "Trust in the authorities needed to restore calm."

But it's trust in the system that's lacking here. Given Mr. Anwar's judicial treatment the last time around, it is difficult to believe he would get a fair trial. His arrest is likely to stimulate more support for his cause of a more democratic and free Malaysia. The government obtained a court order barring Mr. Anwar and the public from going within five kilometers of Parliament on Monday, the day he was planning to attend a key debate.

Malaysia's democracy has come a long way since 1998, when Mahathir Mohamad was Prime Minister. The current Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has introduced a number of reforms, including in the judiciary. Malaysia's democratic institutions -- and Mr. Abdullah's credibility -- are now threatened by his government's treatment of Mr. Anwar.