ZAZZYBOB.COM NEWSLETTER                         December 2005
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Contents
--------

* Preamble
* Seasons Greetings
* Excuses...
* Latest Update
* In The Pipeline
* Other Recent Site Updates
* shutdown -h now


Preamble
--------

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Seasons Greetings
-----------------

Firstly I'd like to wish all the members of the Zazzybob.com all the
best over the festive period. Hope you all have a happy, healthy and
successful 2006!

Excuses...
----------

First off let me explain the lack of newsletters for the past few
months. Things have been very busy for me - I had to leave my job as
the international travel meant spending too much time away from my
family. I now have a great new job at a global organisation tinkering 
with a wide variety of *nix systems (Solaris 2.6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 
RHEL 3 and 4, SCO (Boo Hiss) OpenServer 5.0.6, VMWare ESX Server 2.1 
and 2.5, etc, etc) - it's pretty cool! I've also been doing lots of
work on Zazzybob.com too!

Latest Update
-------------

A large update tonight:

getips.sh will gather your IP addresses for each of your network 
interfaces on a Linux machine. nicspeed.sh is a Solaris script to 
gather NIC speed and negotiation capabilities via ndd. vali_date is a 
thorough script that can be used to validate dates. It can 
accept British or US style dates, and accounts for leap years, etc.

A few tips have been added too. The first shows how to check for file 
fragmentation under Linux. The second is a quick code snippet I use to 
get a list of installed RPMs and a brief description of each. The next 
tip is another code snippet - it emulates the basic functionality of 
the which command on systems that don't have it (SCO OpenServer for 
instance).

Other Recent Site Updates
-------------------------

Seeing as so much has happened at Zazzybob.com I will present a month
by month account of what has been added to the site since June (when the
last newsletter went out).

July 2005 - Comprehensive article added detailing the configuration of
a Sun StorEdge 3510 Fibre Channel Disk Array under Solaris 8 with VxVM.

September 2005 - A new script, centre_string, added. Also, another
mini-tips and one-liner collection uploaded containing 22 one-liners.

October 2005 - Two large articles placed on the site. The first details
the configuration of Solaris Volume Manager to mirror (RAID1) disks 
under Solaris 10 for Intel. This article includes discussions of the
workaround required during failover. A second article shows the 
procedure required to dump the root filesystem under Solaris 10 using
fssnap and ufsdump, and then restoration of the root filesystem using
ufsrestore.

November 2005 - Three scripts added. htpasswdctl, tftpdctl and tips. The
first two are wrappers for the htpasswd command, and tftpd respectively.
tips is a full tips and tricks database written in bash. Two new tips 
added too - The first shows how to set up password protected areas for
your website using htpasswd under Apache. The second shows the basic
steps for using a very cool new feature of Solaris 10 - zones.

In The Pipeline
---------------

I have so many articles, scripts and tips waiting to be uploaded it is
unreal! I use my GMail account as a temporary holding area for works 
in progress (so I can work on things both at work and home easily). I
have close to FIVE HUNDRED work in progress emails sitting there, full
of tips, one-liners, cool commands and other information. It's just a
case of sitting down and finding time to write them all up properly. I
am slowly getting through it, as you can see by this months substantial
site update. Keep tuned for more....

shutdown -h now
---------------

Until next time.....

Cheers,

Kevin Waldron
kevin@zazzybob.com
http://www.zazzybob.com