Happy SysAdmin Day!

Happy SysAdmin Day for me & all sys admin around the globe!
hopefully your users & servers will let you rest today :P


Today, Friday, July 28th, 2006, is the 7th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication.
http://www.sysadminday.com/

random password generator

This is a very simple tool to generate a random password and almost available on all unixes.

$ cat /dev/urandom | strings -n 8 | head -5
?8L803^+}
JFn95:`_
RF+Q~8ff
]r'kZhVG
>2MJ,!]j

Just pick one as your password :)

smart way to mount NFS file system

sometimes NFS mount point can hang when you do a listing (ls -al) due to certain reasons such as server down, network problems etcetera.

to avoid this is it advisable to make the mount point down one level of root.

instead of:

# mount NFS_server:/data /data

in this case, if the mount point hang,

# ls -al /

would take a long time until the NFS mount timed out.

you should do:

# mount NFS_server:/data /new_directory/data

so if the mount point hang, you can still do listing of root.

# ls -al /

would work fine just that

# ls -al /new_directory

would fail.

bash history - ignore duplicate & commands

put these lines in your .bash_profile to ignore duplicate history or to ignore certain commands.
and it also keep your history short :)

# ignore duplicate
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

# ignore these commands in history file
HISTIGNORE=ls:ll:la:l:cd:pwd:exit:mc:su:df:clear