SysAdmins' Chronicles

Create a standard SSH keypair by using the ssh-keygen command. When prompted for a passphrase enter one. Copy your ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to your destination's authorized_keys file. Now login to your destination from the Terminal with ssh. You will be pleasantly surprised with a pop-up box asking for the password associated with the id_rsa SSH key. It gives you the option to store this password in your Leopard keychain if you wish. This effectively takes place of using a ssh-agent to store SSH keys. Continue reading »

In FreeBSD 6.2 and later, the freebsd-update command allows you to update binaries of your base operating system.

It has four commands:

fetch - Inspects current system and downloads available needed updates.

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So you are typing along on the console and press enter to run a command just to have a permission denied message pop-up. You forgot to run sudo. Instead of typing sudo and the entire command over again just type sudo !! and press enter. You will be pleasantly surprised that the command you just ran appears after sudo. All common shells have this quick shortcut. It can be used at anytime and in any commands. Just another little shortcut that makes life a little easier.

When moving or doing an upgrade of a PostgreSQL database that requires you to do a dump of the database, make sure you use the version of pg_dump that matches the version of the PostgreSQL database you plan on restoring the dump to. Different versions of pg_dump will dump the contents of a database in a different order then another version. Thus when restoring a database you will get a number of errors. This is common occurrence between PostgreSQL 7 and PostgreSQL 8. In addition, newer versions will have bug fixes that older versions will not have. Note, the same goes for pg_dumpall.

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If you need to remount a in-use filesystem like / or /usr without rebooting the operating system, use the mount command with the -o remount option.

To remount the root partition using settings found in /etc/fstab.conf run:

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To list all installed packages in Ubuntu, simply run the following command:

 dpkg --get-selections

Thats it.

One complaint I've always had about FreeBSD port's tree is upgrading outdated installed ports. Typically you need to go by hand and uninstall all the dependancies of a port, upgrade the port, and then reinstall all the dependancies. However, there are a few solutions for port upgrade management. The one I like the best is portupgrade that is available in the ports tree under /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade.

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