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Davrom Consulting Pty Ltd

Established Since 2001
PO Box 1644, Sunnybank Hills, Qld, 4109
ABN: 81 096 990 804

Site Time: 19 April 2024 - 01:22

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KEYWORDS=split, storms, blackouts, DAVROM CONSULTING Newsletter - Issue # 26 - Dated: Fri Dec 24 08:57:12 EST 2004

From the desk of David Clark

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               ## /   Merry Christmas From DAVROM   \ ##

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By now most of us have either taken time off to be with family and
friends or have begun to close things down for the quieter time of the
year.

We will be here over the Christmas/New Years break being away for just
the public holidays (25th-28th December, 1st-3rd of January).

On behalf of my wife and I, we would like to wish you all a very Merry
Christmas and we look forward to keeping in touch with you in the the
New Year which we hope will be filled with great prosperity for you.

I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter.

David.M.Clark

UNIX Quote

So who asked Santa for a copy of the latest Linux or UNIX releases this
year?

While you are away

Some points to consider while you are away.

With the holiday season our servers are often left to fend for
themselves - which for UNIX/Linux servers isn't too much to handle as
they don't need much human intervention if any at all.

But in the new year we may get a call regarding some poor little server
that has gone off the air owing to the lack of human care. For this part
of the world things get very warm over the Christmas/New Year break and
servers locked in an office devoid of staff, hence devoid of
air-conditioning, tend to increase in internal temperature and may reach
levels that damage hardware.

With summer storms come blackouts and we have even seen servers that
once they lose power, it requires a human to push the "on" button on the
front of the server even if the mains power is restored (might be time to
install a UPS) and check the BIOS to see if you can over-ride this
power up setting.

If your server is used to store e-mail and you have a lot of user
accounts who send/receive large e-mail attachments, then making sure you
have enough hard disk space to compensate for cluttered mailbox files
might avoid losing e-mails - and then there is the hundreds of spam
e-mails you get.

One good practice is to make sure you have those complete system backups
done before you leave. It is always good to know you have a last known
working snapshot of your server to fall back to - And make sure someone
changes the tape while you are away and if no-one can, then remove the
tape eject instruction in your backup if you have one (One over-written
backup tape is better than none).

You never can tell what some servers will get up to while you are away.

Newsworthy Items
DAVROM: As at December 2004 DAVROM CONSULTING is now a BigPond Internet
Partner which means we are now able to organise, order and implement your
ADSL, Cable and Dialup Internet connections.

SCO: In 2004, SCO launched a new product, SCOx Web Services Substrate which
is a product that enables application developers to take their green screen,
legacy applications and web-enable them in an amazingly simple and cost
effective manner. For more information visit: http://www.sco.com/scox/scobiz/

RedHat: A link worth going too from time to time for the latest updates
from RedHat and some great How-To articles: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/

Cyberguard: WebWasher Content Reporter is an effect product for securing and
managing enterprise networks and events relating to all network activity.
Webwasher Content Reporter gives you a full breakdown of cache, streaming
media, Web and e-mail usage in your company and all this with unmatched
performance.
http://www.cyberguard.com/products/webwasher/webwasher_products/content_reporter/index.html

SUN: The Sun Ray technology is one of the most impressive approaches to
lite desktop and turn-key access to applications that I have seen to
date. Here is the latest on what Sun is doing with its Sun Ray product.
http://www.sun.com/2004-1214/feature/

Tech Tip

When did they put "split" there?

If you are like me you get into the wonderful and powerful standard UNIX
utilities such as sed, awk and grep. But I found split the other day on a
Linux system and it is also on my SCO system as well - so how long have I
been using UNIX/Linux? This is one of those "right under your nose"
scenarios for me - time to go running things in the bin and sbin
directories again to see what else I could use.

In a nutshell, the most practical use of split is to "split" up files
into smaller files. For text files it is great as you may need to divvy
up a large file into sections or into a set number of lines per smaller
file. Give this one a try:

cd /usr/tmp
split -l 10 /etc/passwd

now examine the /usr/tmp directory and you will have a bunch of files
xaa, xab, xac etc. Each of these files contains the sequencial listing of
the /etc/passwd file 10 lines at a time.

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Davrom Consulting Pty Ltd

Established Since 2001 PO Box 1644, Sunnybank Hills, Qld, 4109 ABN: 81 096 990 804 Site Time: 19 April 2024 - 01:22

Established Since 2001
PO Box 1644, Sunnybank Hills, Qld, 4109
ABN: 81 096 990 804

Site Time: 19 April 2024 - 01:22