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Published: 30 November 2008

Installing a new OS may be difficult on machines with no CD/DVD (like Portégé 2000 from toshiba or Asus's EeePc). Hopefully those PC supports boot over network. It is called PXE (Preboot Execution Environment). To boot a computer with PXE you'll need a machine with a DHCP server and a TFTP server.

Here is a simple way to setup a PXE boot server.

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Published: 02 October 2008

Here is a very simple code snippet to ask for an input without showing it on display. Great for all password inputs.

#!/bin/sh
read -p "Username: " uname
stty -echo
read -p "Password: " passw; echo
stty echo

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Published: 08 October 2008

Today let's resize a root EXT3 partition on a LVM without rebooting!

As every sysadmin knows, partition size must be choosen carefully to avoid running into big problems if one of your partition runs out of space. Hopefully LVM  allow you to manage disk space in a flexible way, allowing you to create partitions across several physical hard drives. Now let's see how to resize a root partition with no service interruption (!). In this example, my root partition uses the EXT3 format and is managed by LVM.

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Published: 04 August 2008

Some day you wake up and everything is broken. Your lighttpd log is filled with:

(response.c.544) file not found ... or so:  Too many open files
(mod_proxy.c.744) socket failed:  Too many open files 
(network_linux_sendfile.c.143) open failed:  Too many open files 
(response.c.544) file not found ... or so:  Too many open files /favicon.ico ->

I'm sure every admin running some popular service (or poorly coded software ) has faced this problem.