You know, I honestly have no idea why I decided to do this today, but I was poking around my Digital Ocean account and found something interesting. I hopped on my droplet and for whatever reason decided to see if anyone other than myself was trying to use it. I was shocked to see how many attempts there were. Here’s but a brief section from /var/log/secure: Read More
yumdownloader
So you say you want to download a rpm file from some repository but you don’t necessarily want to install it right away? Or perhaps you want to host it yourself. Well, how about using yumdownloader? Read More
Back On Task
Well, I’ve been studying off and on, but mostly off. I hate to admit it but I don’t have a very good excuse. Well, technically I guess it’s a pretty good one depending on your point of view. My son thinks it’s pretty good. 🙂 We’ve been playing Wii Indiana Jones once I sign off from work and I haven’t felt like playing computer.
The good news is that we’re getting a lot better at figuring out what we have to do to find all the coins, minkits, etc. The bad news is that we each have our own ideas for what we need to do and end up working against each other rather than together. I should probably be a little less uptight about racking up the points and live more through the eyes of a 9-year-old.
But enough with that. This week I’ve been playing around with something new and I have to say that I’m pretty pleased so far. Thanks to StackSocial, I’m enjoying a 30-day trial of Linux Academy. I’m actually working through the LPIC 101 course right now. I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of the RHCSA 7 course but I’m not sure when in April it’ll go live.
One of the coolest features is that you can create up to four test servers. Now I really don’t need this, but it’s pretty awesome because it lets you choose from so many distros. If I were to do this on my own CentOS host I’d have to eat a lot of disk space with ISO images and spend a lot of time creating new virtual machines. I’m also in the midst of a Digital Ocean trial (more about that in a future post). DO makes it incredibly fast and easy to create new servers within seconds but it’s an additional expense. These test servers are all part of your $25/mo payment.
As you can see by the previous screenshot I’ve logged into my primary server via ssh and it’s running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5. This is of particular interest to me since that’s the exact version we’ll be upgrading our work servers to within the month. Since I’m in trial mode I can only create a single server but the most common distros are available. This is real handy for studying the differences between distros (eg package managers, etc.) In addition to easily picking a new distro, you can also easily change the type of server you’re using.
I’m only on day two of my trial but I’m very impressed with the features/functionality and the materials so far. You can expect a more detailed review in the future.
Into the Sandbox
The last thing IÂ want to do is dirty up my main computer with study-related stuff so I’ve put together a dedicated sandbox environment. I can beat the hell out of the system and trash it a thousand times. It doesn’t matter if I screw anything up because worst case I’ll just start over. Read More
sed & awk
One of the tasks I find myself doing a lot these days is reviewing web and application logs. Working in a Windows environment with a product responsible for literally billions of transactions each year it’s difficult if not impossible to do this. A single days’ log can easily exceed the capabilities of many Windows text editors and those that can manage it aren’t as fast as Unix tools.
I don’t have a huge need for sed, the Unix stream editor, but I make extensive use of awk. grep is also another tool that plays an important role in my toolbox. Since awk and grep both make use of regular expressions it was nice to find a chapter dedicated to the subject.
There are three chapters dedicated to sed and four geared towards awk. Each utility also has its own quick-reference guide.
The book hasn’t been updated in some time (pre-2000) but let’s face it, not a whole lot changes with basic Unix functionality. I found the examples to be concise and well-suited to helping me grasp the concepts. The material goes much deeper than what I need for my daily tasks but it’s nice to know that a lot of power is at my fingertips should I need it.
If you’re new to ‘nix system administration or like me and trying to clear off the dust this is a great reference book. Grab a copy!
RHCSA/RHCE Study Guide
This is my chosen text for my Red Hat cert. I’ve made it through chapter 4Â so far and I’ll update this as I make progress. Unfortunately, while it appears to be a good text for the most part I do concur with a number of negative comments from Amazon and other sites.
Things do seem a bit disjointed. I find myself skipping forward and back again trying to set things up. For example, you’re expected to set the virtual machines up before you learn how to set them up. I do like the general layout and the exam and real-world tips that are broken out of the main text. I’m not put off by the issues enough to knock the book.
Raspberry Pi
I’ve always been a gadget nerd and a while back the Raspberry Pi caught my eye. I suppose there’s something to be said for extremely small platforms but I wanted a little more than 512MB. The Pi 2 Model B fits the bill perfectly. Read More
The Road to Certification
If you read the About page, you know that I’m working on attaining Red Hat Certified System Administrator (and possibly Certified Engineer) certification. I’ve been in the IT industry since 1995 and this is the first cert I’ve actually been interested in. We’ll see how it goes. Read More