Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Bash debugger

This is for all of you hardcore bash scripters that sometimes want better debugging than placing "echo" statements in your scripts.

A co-worker sent this out to our internal sysadmin mail alias today.

http://www.linux.com/feature/153383

It references the bashdb project (bash debugger). I didn't know one existed.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Red Hat Satellite 5.2 released

In an earlier post, I mentioned I was unable to fit Red Hat Satellite or Fedora Spacewalk into our infrastructure. The previous version of Red Hat Satellite required Oracle 9i (we run 10g), and Spacewalk requires a derivative of RHEL/CentOS 5 (our standard is version 4). I saw this release today by Red Hat announcing Satellite version 5.2. It now supports Oracle 10g, and still runs on RHEL4 or RHEL5. Too bad everyone is hurting now and pulling the purse strings on their budgets. It would be tough for me to ask for a RHEL AS4 and a Satellite 5.2 license now.

I wonder how hard it would be to backport Spacewalk to RHEL4?

Friday, November 7, 2008

Another iPhone security problem

Reported by El Reg, it appears that the "Emergency Call" feature on PIN protected iPhones are not discriminatory to certain numbers.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/07/iphone_passcode/

I've confirmed this on my iPhone 3G (version 2.1), and was able to dial a non-emergency number (my landline phone number). This number is also not listed as a contact in my phone either. So, word to the wise, if you lose your iPhone, people can still make unauthorized calls on it.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Should you learn vi?

There are so many arguments about which editor to use. Some people are quite passionate about their editor of choice. I came across this blog post today through Planet SysAdmin discussing why one person uses vi for system administration.

http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/WhyViForSysadmins

It pretty much sums up why it was stronly suggested to me to use vi at the beginning of my career. At that time, I only knew pico and a few commands in emacs; although now, I couldn't tell you how to edit a file in either. Over the years I've noticed the author's point is true. Almost any unix type system you encounter, it will have at least vi installed. It's definitely handy to have a basic proficiency with vi if you do any command line *NIX administration.

So, while you get your caffeine fix at work, this could come in handy as well.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/mugs/7bbe/