Unix Tip: Using netgroups to share files

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

Solaris and other SVR4 versions of Unix provide file sharing through NFS and the /etc/dfs/dfstab file. The syntax of this particular file permits you to restrict file system sharing to a limited number of hosts or to share file systems with no restrictions whatsoever. Restricting file systems to a select set of hosts is particularly important if you are permitting the client hosts to access the file systems read/write and even more important if root on the clients will have the authority of root on your NFS server.

You can specify the hosts that are permitted to mount file systems by stringing them together in a colon-separated format with the share command, such as this command which can be issued on the command line or included in the dfstab file for a more or less permanent setup:

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Storage Tip: Steps to long-term retention of digital information

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

According to a recent survey from the SNIA's Data Management Forum, over half (53%) of the respondents stated that they have information that must be retained permanently, and 83% stated that they have information that must be retained over 50 years. Before you can put together your long term data archiving strategy, you must identify how long you need to keep your data.

Here's what you need to know...

Windows Tip: Building a supportable enterprise, part 4

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

By now you've probably learned at least one important thing about keeping your Windows infrastructure supportable, namely: leave well enough alone. Last time I touched on this topic, I highlighted the dangers of trying to "harden" your network by disabling so-called "unneeded" services. The result of doing this without a proper understanding of what Windows services actually do can lead to broken applications and other mysterious problems. Let's look at another common "hardening" technique that often has more downside than upside -- changing the Access Control Lists (ACLs) on your boot/system volume.

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Windows Tip: Beyond the run box

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

I like to use the keyboard as much as possible and avoid using the mouse, but if I use my Run box for so many different purposes, my RunMRU key fills up with too many saved entries for me to make useful use of this feature. My main priority is for frequently-used UNC paths to be easily accessible from the Run box, so it would be nice if there was an alternative way for me to easily open Web site URLs by simply typing them.

Well, where there's a script, there's usually a way.

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Unix tip: Viewing device aliases on the command line

By Sandra Henry Stocker

Ever wish you could take a look at the device aliases on a Solaris system without having to descend all the way down to the ok prompt? Well, you can. By issuing the proper version of the prtconf (print system configuration) command, you can include a list of device aliases in your prtconf output.

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Unix Tip: Redirecting standard error in Perl

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

There are numerous ways to redirect standard error in a Perl script. You can redirect the output from one particular command, you can combine standard error with standard out so that the two are handled together or you can send all standard error to the bit bucket. None of these techniques depends on what the person running the script does. Instead, they can all be set up in your Perl scripts. Let's take a look at how this works.

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Windows tip: Annotating web content

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

It's easy to annotate a Word doc with Ink, but what if I need to annotate a Web page? For example, say there's a long Microsoft Knowledge Base article I need to read through and annotate -- how I can I annotate a Web page? I've been doing it the hard way until I discovered this trick.

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Windows Tip: Building a supportable enterprise, part 3

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

It's called the law of unintended consequences -- you do "A" to take care of "B", and then "C" unexpectedly happens. In a previous tip, I talked about "leaving well enough alone" and gave the example that when you uninstall Outlook Express from your domain controller (Why not? Who needs an email client on a domain controller? What could go wrong?), an unintended consequence can occur: it breaks your CDO interfaces on your server. While this example might seem a bit obscure to some, there are many more such "hidden dependencies" in Windows, and casual tweaking (in the name of "hardening") can often cause you to run up against these dependencies.

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Unix Tip: A SCSI mystery: Come and gone

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

On a late Friday evening, just as I was about to leave for home, one of the servers I manage suddenly started having what appeared to be serious disk problems. Its NFS clients were collecting "NFS server not responding still trying" errors. The system itself was unable to process share and unshare commands. My initial fear was that the system had suffered a disk crash and would have to be rebuilt from spare parts and backups before the staff's arrival on Monday morning.

The system was still running, but having serious problems running ordinary commands and the console was filling up with messages like these...

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