I created a nice little reference document for Vi and Vim.  It gives some background and history, and then goes on to explain a few things as well as provide a list of a lot of useful commands for use within Vi and/or Vim.  Vi and Vim are very powerful text editors found on any NIX platform.  Take a look at these commands and shortcuts and turn your Vi time into a powerhouse of productivity!

Hi folks, it’s been a bit since I put anything new up here, life has been real busy lately.  To that end though, I have been working on stuff for the site, and I just posted something that I think is very useful.  It took awhile to put it all together, but nothing is too good for my visitors.

I have been working with Veritas Volume Manager, now called Veritas Storage Foundation lately.  I have worked with it in the past, but not as in depth as I have in recent weeks.  I decided to make a reference for myself, since I seem to get into it for a bit and then don’t touch it for awhile because it just runs.  Then I figured I would make it as comprehensive as I could, plus easy to read, pretty, etc, and then post it here for anyone and everyone that might find it useful.

I have it on the site in HTML format here, and I also have it up in the downloads section as a PDF if you wan to download a copy.  Check it out and let me know if you see anything I missed, I hope you find it useful!

I have posted a new article on setting up a pop3 server, specifically Qpopper on a Linux server.  Qpopper is a solid, robust pop3 server that has served me (and thousands of my customers) well for many years.  I recommend it for anyone out there that needs a good and free pop3 server.  Enjoy!

I have a new article up that I have written and dropped off into the Library about configuring sendmail on Linux. Although it should work on most any distribution that will run sendmail even if some file locations may change. Have a look, check it out, send me some feedback if you love it, hate it, or if I made a boo boo somewhere. As always, I hope you find it useful. Thanks!

Have you ever needed to create a file of a specific size? Not where the contents are anything specific, but you just need a file that is whatever size so you can test disk I/O or network transfer speed or whatever it is you want to test. For whatever reason, I have found it very handy to be able to create these test files when needed, so I thought I would pass along some tips to that end. Here are some ways you can accomplish this with Solaris and Linux.

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Have you ever downloaded a cpio file and wondered what the heck you were going to to with it? I get them from Oracle all the time, and the first time I downloaded one I wasn’t sure what to make of it. In the end, I found that working with cpio files is a breeze, so I thought I would pass on some information that might help.

Ok, just what is a cpio file? A cpio file is an archive, and it is a concatenation of one or more files. Each file in the collection contains a header optionally followed by file contents as indicated in the header. The end of the archive is indicated by another header describing an empty file named TRAILER. There are two types of cpio archives, differing only in the style of the header. ASCII archives have totally printable header information, so, if the files being archived are also ASCII files, the whole archive is ASCII. By default though, cpio writes archives with binary headers.

How do we work with these archive files? Easy. Here is an example, say you download a gzipped cpio file:

• First, download filename.cpio.gz and use gzip to uncompress.
• Then use cat filename.cpio | cpio -icd to extract to contents.

There you go, when you are done, the contents of the cpio file should be extracted to where ever you put the cpio file and ran the command. If you want to create an archive, you can pass a file list, like with find to the cpio command and have it create an archive, much like tar does. In my own experience, I prefer tar, but if you have cpio and don’t have tar, it’s better than nothing! Check out this page for more details, a nice article from Linux Journal.