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[one-liner]: Managing RPM Repo GPG keys on a RPM base Distro (Fedora/CentOS/RHEL)

Posted on June 16, 2011 by News

Background

Occasionally you might need to remove an RPM GPG signing key from your system. These are the keys that typically get installed using a command similar to this:

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rpm –import http://packages.atrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms

Turns out they’re pretty easy to remove….

Solution

The key is to understand that most of the same commands that you’d use to query your RPM database apply [...] Continue reading →

Posted in centos, fedora, linux, one-liner, package management, redhat, rhel, rpm, Syndicated, sysadmin, tips & tricks | Leave a comment

[one-liner]: Can’t Connect to VMware Server 2.x from Internet Explorer 8

Posted on June 13, 2011 by News

Background

Recently I ran into a problem where I wasn’t able to connect to a VMware Server from IE 8. I was getting an error message that didn’t give me much to go on. Basically IE displayed a blank page and there was a little yellow exclamation point in the lower left corner of IE.

<p [...] Continue reading →

Posted in one-liner, Syndicated, sysadmin, tip, tips & tricks, vmware | Leave a comment

[one-liner]: Working around the SSH error message: Too many authentication failures for root

Posted on June 8, 2011 by News

Background

Yesterday I ran into an issue while trying to ssh to one of my computers. I started getting this error, Too many authentication failures for root. At first I thought it has something to do with PAM or some sort of login detection protection related to /var/log/btmp (a log file maintaining bad login attempts). Turns [...] Continue reading →

Posted in linux, one-liner, Security, shell, ssh, Syndicated, sysadmin, tip, tips & tricks | Leave a comment

[one-liner]: Connecting to VMware Server 2.x from Linux without using a Browser

Posted on May 16, 2011 by News

Background

Here’s a quick tip on how to connect to VMware server 2.x remotely from a Linux box. In this case it’s a Fedora 14 system but this approach should work just fine from any Red Hat distro such as RHEL and/or CentOS.

Solution

2 so-so workarounds

One of the annoyances of using VMware Server 2.x, is that it’s [...] Continue reading →

Posted in centos, fedora, firefox, one-liner, plugins, redhat, rhel, Syndicated, sysadmin, tips & tricks, vmware | Leave a comment

Debugging an Intermittently Dropping Intel Wireless-N 1000 Network Card on Fedora 14

Posted on May 12, 2011 by News

Background

Recently I’ve been experiencing a strange problem with my wireless NIC on my Lenovo/Thinkpad T410i laptop. The laptop would invariably stop being able to access the network. I would get a connection to our wireless access point (even an IP address), but wasn’t able to do much else. Pinging other systems or anything else would [...] Continue reading →

Posted in fedora, networking, Syndicated, sysadmin, tip, tips & tricks, wifi | Leave a comment

[one-liner]: Mounting a SMB/CIFS Share as an Automount on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL

Posted on May 11, 2011 by News

Background

Here’s a quick tip on how to automatically mount/unmount a SMB/CIFS Windows share on a CentOS/Fedora/RHEL server, when ever it’s accessed. This tip makes use of Linux’s automounter (autofs) & the mount (mount.cifs) command.

Manually Mounting

command template

Here’s two examples of the prototypical command for mounting a SMB/CIFS share.

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# example pattern #1
% mount -t cifs //[hostname]/[share] [local_mount_point] [...] Continue reading →

Posted in automount, centos, fedora, one-liner, redhat, rhel, samba, Syndicated, sysadmin, tips & tricks | Leave a comment

Command Line Tools for Analyzing Disk Usage on Fedora/CentOS/RHEL

Posted on May 5, 2011 by News

Background

Here’s a quick rundown of some command line tools that can be used to determine disk usage on a Linux box. Most of these are command line based, meaning that you can use them from within a shell. But they aren’t just commands, they’re fullblown applications that you can run from within a terminal!

ncdu – [...] Continue reading →

Posted in diskspace, linux, Syndicated, sysadmin, tip, tips & tricks | Leave a comment

[one-liner]: Calculating Disk Space Usage for a List of Files Using du under Linux

Posted on May 4, 2011 by News

Background

Being the most techie of my group of friends I often get other people’s problems dumped into my lap when something goes wrong with their computer. I generally don’t mind since it gives me the opportunity to help out a friend and work on some obscure problems, such as:

* issue #1: laptop no longer works, [...] Continue reading →

Posted in backup, linux, one-liner, shell, Syndicated, sysadmin, tip, tips & tricks | Leave a comment

[one-liner]: Working with VMware ESXi 3.5 via the command line

Posted on May 2, 2011 by News

Background

Recently I’ve been getting more hands on experience with VMware ESXi 3.5 at my day job. It seems pretty capable in it’s free version form. After familiarizing myself with the command line shell over the last few days it’s finally starting to make sense. If you’ve worked on any Red Hat distros such as Fedora/CentOS/RHEL [...] Continue reading →

Posted in one-liner, server, shell, Syndicated, sysadmin, tip, tips & tricks, virtualization, vmware | Leave a comment

[one liner]: Mounting .iso images in VMware ESXi

Posted on April 26, 2011 by News

Background

Recently we “inherited” a fairly old yet still usable Intel Pentium 4 system with 2GB RAM that we wanted to use as a testbed for learning more about VMware’s ESXi products. Given the systems age we had to use ESXi 3.5 which was still adequate for our needs. Installing VMware ESXi is pretty straightforward, however [...] Continue reading →

Posted in centos, one-liner, Syndicated, sysadmin, tip, tips & tricks, virtualization, vmware | Leave a comment