NIC Replacement in Linux

In the past, I've found it slightly annoying that if I needed to swap
out a network interface card (NIC), Red Hat distros of Linux would kindly
backup the interface configuration for that interface and generate a stub
DHCP configuration in its place.  This leaves the host potentially with

Fixing a Broken initrd in Linux

I recently had a situation where a host's disk controller failed.
The box would get partially through a BIOS post before throwing errors
about the failed controller and then fail to boot.  To resolve the
situation, we effectively replaced said controller.  This, however, lead

Fixing an Overly Eager chown in Linux

A while ago, someone asked me how to recover from a mistyped recursive
'chown' they performed.  They mistyped the path and it executed against
the root FS (/), though they caught it before it acted on everything.
Ideally, one would have a backup to recover from, however that wasn't

VxVM DG Disabled

During a recent SAN maintenance, we ran into an issue on a few hosts that
were unfortunately single pathed to the SAN and lost connectivity to it.
The SAN-presented disk devices were under Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM)
control which started to present I/O errors as a result and displayed

Configuring iSCSI Initiators in Windows 2008

Since it's been a while since I've written up a Windows related post, I
thought I'd add one on setting up iSCSI initiators from the command line
(cli).  (It also gave me a reason to toy around in PowerShell (PS).)
Microsoft makes iSCSI initiator software available for Windows 2000,

Process Memory Usage

Since resources on a host are finite, it can be useful to know the
impact of a process or processes on those resources.  In this instance,
we'll take a look at a process' use of memory.  Our details for this are:

Notes on Packages in Solaris 11

While working out details for a separate write up, I started stumbling
through Solaris' new handling of packages, IPS.  Unlike previous versions
of Solaris which used the traditional "pkgXYZ" commands, directory
structures, etc, IPS (image packaging system) uses a completely new

VLAN Tagging and Vanity Naming in Solaris 11

While awaiting Solaris 11 to be released, I've recently been poking
around in Solaris 11 Express for a preview of what to expect.  In setting
up a test box, I needed to set up VLAN tagging (802.1q trunking) on
an interface.  Due to some of the new Solaris 11 networking features,