welcome

Sys Admin
Pocket Survival Guide (PSG)

Howdy there! This is my collection of notes that I have collected over the years as a Sys Admin. I am sharing them here hoping that they will be useful to you. These are concise notes to refresh your mind on how to do certain things, maybe you know what need to be done on one platform but don't know the commands on another. Or maybe just pointers for you to read up the relevan man pages or know what to google for :) They are work in progress, I know I need to polish up my notes so that other can make sense of them. As time permits...--which never really happens :-/

Thanks for those who have send kind and encouraging words to me, it is nice to know that these notes are actually useful for someone other than myself!
And special thanks to those who send me notes about mistakes, some pretty bad ones that could have caused someone to loose his/her job! So, be warned, check the man pages etc when doing something that could have negative impact (unexporting file system, shrinking volume, etc)!

Okay, after a while of not having a home, I am hosting PSG on dropbox now. If you are bookmarking this, please use http://tiny.cc/tin6150/

<-- Please click if you found this site useful ;-)

• Electrical plugs (Pictorial Guide)
•  
• LDAP (ldap book review)
  
• HP-UX and supplement.
  
• AIX and AIX CD catalog
  
• Solaris ( SDS/SVM, Security/JASS, IPMP, OBP, LOM, RSC, IPMI, Jumpstart, T3, A1000, RM6, StorEdge, )
• Linux (Kickstart, XDMCP, Services)
• Windows (DOS CLI, unix centric)
  
• Irix
• Apple Mac (OS/X unix centric)
  
• VNC, X Emulation Running Unix GUI apps in Windows
  
• Unix backup (Native OS commands: tar, cpio, pax, ufsdump, dd, ssh tunneling)
• Generic Unix Commands:: wget, pgp, ssh-keygen, uuencode...
  
• Unix File System:: Commands, config files, samba, cifs,
• General Unix Sys Admin :: Commands, config files, YP/NIS, NTP, net-snmp, sudo, chroot, ...
• .
• Factory Default Password.
• Sys Admin tools and performance tuning:: SAR, iostat, vmstat, SE Toolkit, tcpdump, snoop, ethereal, nmap, tripwire,
  
• Development in Unix :: (Unix sys admin development, NOT real developer :)
  • Overview of diff compilers, .a vs .so libraries. TBA.
    
  • Rosetta Stone of Unix Scripting (summary differences of bash vs tcsh vs awk vs perl. (source .rtf)
  • Bourne/ksh/sh, csh/tcsh shell command and script.
  • AWK,
  • Perl,
  • Python,
  • PHP,
  • javascript_eg,
  • gcc
  • gdb,
  • java
  • rcs, cvs, p4, subversion
  • vi
• .
• Network ( Cisco ( MDS fibre channel switch ), Foundry, ExtremeNet, CheckPoint, PIX, Load Balancer, )
• InfiniBand
  
• Acopia (F5 ARX virtual file server/director)
  
• NetApp
  
• EMC (SAN) Clariion
  
• EMC (NAS) Celerra
  
• Isilon
  
• Veritas :: VxVM, VCS, NetBackup
• Legato Networker
• MySQL
• Select keyboard layout map for Chinese and Spanish/Thai/Dvorak
•  
• HTML tags quick reference.
• WiKi tags quick reference.
• Batch System/Grid Computing LSF, PBS/Torque, LSF.
• Parallel Computing API/Layer MPI, PVM
• Science File Format/Info
•  
• 3rd Party and Vendor Docs Cache
  
• TBD .

IMHO

• Network monitoring tool review: Nagios/NetSaint, BigBrother, What's Up, GFI
• Network Architecture Approaches The "art" part of designing a network.
• NAS vs SAN vs iSCSI
• Stand alone server, blade server, partitionable machines (LPAR, Domain), virtual machines. VMware, MS Virtual Server vs VirtuoZo
• Documentation platform: plain text, HTML/CSS, TeX/LaTeX, FrameMaker, OpenOffice, MS Office, WordPerfect, WiKi.
  Word Assistant and vi Assistant :-)
  

Products Review

• Terminal (Serial Console) Servers
• Enterprise Products (an overview of some High-Availability products for Solaris)

Links

References

1. A Rosetta Stone of Unix OS Languages (as per the author). It is a pretty good translation between the many different Unix OS.
   
2. A Rosetta Stone of Unix Shell Scripts
   
3. Static table map of Unix OS commands from unixguide.net.
4. AIX vs Solaris commands mapping
5. Advanced Horizons has pretty good, concise info on AIX, Linux, Windows, Hardware, etc.
6. Online Unix books (Mostly in Russian, some in English)
7. Samba-CIFS
8. Google for bookshelf
9. .

Lighter Readings

1. Unixville Geeks galore :)
2. Folklore on computer and companies (currently only apple).
3. The New Hacker's Dictionary Hilarious read for the insiders. book ISBN 0262680920
   

Tools

1. HTML Validator
2. Synergy Two computers, two monitors, ONE keyboard and mouse, with cut and paste!! synergy.conf
3. crypt generation web form for generating encrypted password
4. ASCII Art Generator, kinda like web-based figlet, pretty cool :) Another version hosted by a friend of mine.
5. cacert.org Free Digital Certificate for secure web servers, etc.
6. Sunfreeware main mirror site hosted by tds.net.
7. .

Books

• Unix System Administration Handbook by Nemeth et al. This is the Bible for Unix Sys Admin. Excellent read and reference. Highly recommended.
• Essential System Administration by Frisch. Another comprehensive Unix Sys Admin Book.
• Tha Awk Programming Language by the original authors. Kinda old, but very concise yet easy to read, so still highly recommended. After reading Ch3, you can do most of what you would need to do with Awk. Unfortunately, its age does not cover new features implemented by gAWK :-(

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About me

I have been "hacking" computers for 10+ years now. I started liking to fiddle with OS since college days in FIU, and it is still a hobby when I am not hiking and biking or studying for biotech :-)

Copyright info about this work

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5 License.

Pocket Sys Admin Survival Guide: for content that I wrote, (CC) 2005,2009 Tin Ho [ tin6150 (at) gmail.com ] some rights reserved. Some contents are "cached" here for easy reference. Sources include man pages, vendor documents, online references, discussion groups, etc. Copyright of those are obviously those of the vendor and original authors. I am merely caching them here for quick reference and avoid broken URL problems.

DOC URL, Where is the "home" PSG ?
http://tiny.cc/tin6150/ New home in 2011.06.
http://unixville.com/~sn/psg/psg.html (coming soon)
ftp://sn.is-a-geek.com/psg/psg.html My home "server". Up sporadically.
http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~tho01/psg/psg.html (no longer updated as of 2007-06)
http://www.fiu.edu/~tho01/psg/psg.html (no longer updated as of 2007-05)

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"LYS on the outside, LKS in the inside"
"AUHAUH on the outside, LAPPLAPP in the inside"
sn50 tin6150 psg101sn.is-a-geek.com

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