nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Download Yellow Dog Linux 6.0 for Apple PowerPC, Sony PS3, IBM System

Posted: 06 Feb 2008 06:32 AM CST

Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 for Sony PS3, Apple G4/G5, and IBM System p. has been released. It is built upon the CentOS foundation, a popular derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), YDL v6.0. It means you can have enterprise grade Linux quality on the home computer. You can install YDL 6.0 on:

=> Sony Playstation 3 (PS3)

=> Apple PowerPC G4 and G5

=> IBM System p such as 510, 520, 540 etc

See Yellow Dog Linux 6.0 release note for more information. You can grab YDL 6.0 here. I may try it out on my PS3 for fun

Linux Xen High Availability Clusters Configuration Tutorial

Posted: 06 Feb 2008 02:46 AM CST

Xen is one of the leading Virtualization software. You can use Xen virtualization to implement HA clusters. However, there are few issues you must be aware of while handling failures in a high-availability environment. This article explains configuration options using Xen:

The idea of using virtual machines to build high available clusters is not new. Some software companies claim that virtualization is the answer to your HA problems, off course that’s not true. Yes, you can reduce downtime by migrating virtual machines to another physical machine for maintenance purposes or when you think hardware is about to fail, but if an application crashes you still need to make sure another application instance takes over the service. And by the time your hardware fails, it’s usually already too late to initiate the migration.

So, for each and every application you still need to look at whether you want to have it constantly available, if you can afford the application to be down for some time, or if your users won’t mind having to relogin when one server fails.

=> Using Xen for High Availability Clusters [onlamp.com]

Download of the day: atool for Managing File Archives of Various Types

Posted: 06 Feb 2008 02:33 AM CST

atool is a script for managing file archives of various types such as .zip, tar.gz and all other formats. From the article:

Atool uses other tools behind the scenes to perform the heavy lifting. With atool, you can handle any archive without having to remember what command-line tool to use to expand it and which options that particular tool expects. Atool comes with a collection of commands, including aunpack, apack, als, acat, adiff, and arepack. The tools are all links to the main atool Perl script, but they perform the actions that their name suggests — for example, unpacking or creating a new archive.

Debian / Ubuntu Linux user can install atool using apt-get command, enter:
$ sudo apt-get install atool $ aunpack backuo.tar.gz $ aunpack -e *.tar.gz $ apack myarchive.zip foo bar $ man atool

Download atool

=> Download atool package (via Linux.com)

FreeBSD Find Out all Installed Hard Disk Information

Posted: 06 Feb 2008 03:27 AM CST

Q. How do I find out all installed hard disk names under FreeBSD without rebooting the server? How do I use the equivalent of fdisk -l in Linux, with FreeBSD to list all hard disks?

Answer to "FreeBSD Find Out all Installed Hard Disk Information"