So, you’ve decided you want to setup a symlink, well look no further! It is a fun tool that is most commonly used to set up a shortcut or a filesystem redirect.  Well the full explaination of one and how it works can be found at this page .  But really, it is quite simple:

ln -s target linkname

target=where you want to the shortcut to go

linkname=where you want to name the shortcut

Here are a couple examples:

Say you’re tired of typing in a full path to something like a web root, you can setup something like this:

ln -s /var/www/vhosts/google.com/httpdocs/ /root/google.com

Then when you log in as root, you can just do cd google.com and be dumped into web root

Alternatively, say you moved mission critical files for a program like libs to a different dir for tidiness reasons and adjusting the code would take too long, you can just symlink it to save time!

ln -s newdir olddir

so ln -s /usr/local/php5 /usr/local/php4 would direct all calls to the php4 dir to the php5 dir, where all of your new libs are.

Ever wanted to run Linux or Unix distros while running your Windows, Mac, or even *nix desktop?

Well, I recently had the need to, as I am testing out different distros, in earnest attempt to find one I like for dual booting with my Windows laptop.
To check it out go to VirtualBox.org . The usability is pretty simple, but has some nicely advanced features.

Screen Shots after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

I have had a spare 1G thumb drive lying around, a gimme from a conference my company went to, and really haven’t decided what to do with it yet. In lieu of this, I went searching for some distros to put on it. Obviously the prime choice is Damn Small Linux but I wanted to see what else was available. After some fine Google searching, I came across Fedora 9’s new Live USB Creator

Now, I know all good admins hate Fedora with a passion, but hey, this is for the sake of testing stuff out!

So I downloaded the tool via this link: Download

Once you download, extract, and run the exe, you get this screen:

Here is where the tool excels immediately:

You can use an existing live cd you have downloaded to your pc, or you this tool will download it for you.

Here are the different distros you can choose from:

I did not have an active live cd on my machine, so I let the tool download one for me. I went with Fedora 9 KDE , as Fedora doesn’t seem like Fedora without a GUI .

The persistent overlay function is highly valuable as it sets your working storage space. Typically you will want to set this to at least 205M but, ultimately this is up to you.

So, I was able to finally test out the USB key, and man, the new KDE is amazing. Almost makes me want to take out my centos system and load in this new Fedora 9. Fortunately though, I wont be as CentOS is better for OpenVZ .

So, in summary, this system is truly bad ass, especially for you rack monkeys out there that are tired of live cds, and want to make easy live keys.

So thanks to an article in this months Linux Magazine I found a new monitoring toy called Munin . It is a wonderful monitoring tool that pairs well with Nagios as being intensive in results, but light in resource usage. I suggest checking it out for sure.  I even have a handy dandy guide I found for centos installs : http://blog.jploh.com/2007/06/14/how-to-install-munin-on-centos/