Unix is a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system that was initially developed by Bell Labs in the 1970s. Various similar operating systems that are POSIX compliant (ie compatible with Unix) have since been developed (POSIX is an abbreviation for Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX). These include the following: the BSD family (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS/X), Solaris, IRIX, AIX, SunOS, UnixWare, OpenServer and Linux.
Software written for POSIX compliant operating systems is generally able to be compiled for all POSIX platforms with little or no platform-specific changes. This makes the commands and utilities available for this extended family of operating systems very similar, and there are few differences between administering them.
The articles in this section are about useful command line utilities and commonly used application software on POSIX compliant operating systems. For Mac OSX specific articles see my OSX section.
AWStats provides a useful overview of website statistics from your Apache log files. There is no automatic way to install AWStats on CentOS using yum, so this article looks at how to install AWStats on CentOS. The instructions below should also work on other Linux distributions that do not have an automatic way of installing AWStats.
The date daylight savings starts and ends changed in New Zealand last year, but unfortunately there was only a few months between when the decision was made and when it happened and the updates to the timezone databases on various Linux distributions wasn’t done in time in many cases. This affected many servers and services which displayed the wrong time for the couple of weeks between when daylight savings actually started and when it would have in previous years.
I set up a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with Net24 today with CentOS 5.0 i386 as the virtual server operating system. After logging in as root I discovered the operating system install was pretty minimal and didn’t include yum for package management, so I had to manually install yum with rpm.
I've just started using a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with CentOS 5.0 i386 as the virtual server operating system, but it has a pretty minimal operating system install. When I went to run the nslookup command to look up an IP address I got the error message nslookup: command not found.
Security-Enhanced Linux, also know as SELinux, implements various security policies on Linux and additional levels of access crontrol. It was originally developed by the U.S. National Security Agency to adhere to the "Orange Book" guidelines. On CentOS 5 it is enabled by default, but there may be circumstances where you don’t need SELinux’s additional security and may want to disable it.
This article details how to save man pages as human readable plain text files. Man page is an abbreviation for Unix and Linux manual pages which form the basis of the help system for command line utilies.