Sysadmin

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How to find out the filesystem type of devices and partitions on Linux

Written on October 23rd, 2010 at 02:17 am by shredder12

So, I was working on a system remotely over ssh and I had to find out what filesystem was a particular partition formatted into. The thing looks trivial, but if you have been using some GUI app for this, then it won't come easy if you are working on a console. The trick in such situations is to look into the commands that deal with stuff similar to what you want, i.e disks & partitions in my case. So, I went for df, & parted.

How to allow users in a group to run all commands in Fedora / CentOS using sudo

Written on July 8th, 2010 at 00:50 am by chia

This tutorial will guide you on how to allow a group of users to run all the commands without sharing your system root password in Fedora / Redhat / CentOS based Distros.

The difference between Primary and Secondary groups in Linux

Written on July 6th, 2010 at 02:02 am by chia

The security of a file on Linux is managed very well using the concept of ownership and permissions. There can be three kind of permissions - read, write and execute and similary the ownership is divided into three kinds too - a user, group and others. Groups are a great way to share your work or work in collaboration with others by defining a group, whose members have the write to contribute/modify/see the work.

How to change username or UserID/uid on Linux

Written on June 30th, 2010 at 14:33 pm by chia

Usermod is a useful command to manage user settings. It modifies the system account files to reflect the changes that are specified on the command line. It is capable of doing a lot of things, but here we will see how to change username and UserID or uid on Linux using usermod.

How to force inactive users to logout automatically after time out on Linux?

Written on June 17th, 2010 at 21:24 pm by chia

When you work on different servers from your system, the sessions are scattered over various terminals across different workspaces. Its a common mistake people usually make by leaving one or more of those server sessions open. Such sessions can lead to bad things if they get in hands of someone else. So, instead of blaming the user its always a good practice for sys-admins to automatically logout a user who is inactive for quite sometime.

Unix Named Pipes - An example of Interprocess communication

Written on September 8th, 2010 at 02:14 am by shredder12

So, I have been selected as one of the teaching assistants for Operating systems course and this time we had to give some examples of Named Pipes, demonstrating one form of Inter Process Communication aka IPC to the students. I had never used them before, but its fun knowing and working with them.

How to add user to a Group on Linux

Written on July 6th, 2010 at 17:50 pm by chia

Managing users is an important activity in Linux. For a Sysadmin, you want different access permissions for developers, maintainers and moderators. Groups are an easy way to categorize users. Rights/permissions given to a group will be applicable to all its members. In this howto, I will tell you how to add users to a group.

I would suggest you to read about the two types of groups - Primary and Secondary, before proceeding.

How to Change Ownership of a file on Linux

Written on July 5th, 2010 at 03:36 am by chia

File ownership is a way to manage files of different users and share files between users of same groups. Every file in linux is managed by a specific user and a group. The chmod command helps to define file permissions separately for user, group and others.

Linux SysAdmin: Use w and ps commands to find out what other users are doing

Written on June 28th, 2010 at 13:03 pm by chia

There are several utilities to find out what other logged in users are doing on a system, who is currently active, remote host one has used to login, what processes are they runnning and similar such info. In this howto, I will show you how to use 'w' and 'ps' commands to get such information. Such info comes in handy to a sysadmin.

How to force users to change their password upon first login?

Written on June 17th, 2010 at 14:41 pm by chia

In this tutorial we will force a new user to change the password upon first login. This is usually used by sysadmins. We will use a linux command 'chage' - which will change user password expiry information.

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