I am one of those type of people that like to make backup copies of files before I tinker with them, especially when I am modifying important files like system stuff. It’s always a good idea to make a backup copy before you edit something so you can put it back if you break it. For that reason, I wrote this simple little PERL script that I then put somewhere in my path so I can run it from anywhere. I call it simply “bu” so that it’s easy to type and use. What it does is copy the target file you specify, to a file of the same name only with a date stamp appended to it. I have found this to be a really handy tool, so I thought I would share.

Take a look at the script here.

Check it out, I hope you find it as useful as I have.

One of the best things about Solaris 10, from Sun Microsystems, is Zones or Containers.  They allow you to create virtual OS installs on the same box, yet have them quite separate from each other.  Processes are segregated, resources can be capped, the options go on and on.  Here I have a PERL script (have I mentioned that I love PERL lately?), that makes the creation of zones a snap.  The only thing to edit in the script is at the top, where you set your zone base directory, as in the directory that will hold the zones your create.  I am a simple man, and usually just stick them all in /data/zones, with /data usually being a separate mount point and thus separate I/O path.

The script has been posted in our forums, head on over and take a look!

One tool that I haven’t seen on *nix that I see my Windows brethren using, is called portping. There is a little freeware app called portping for Windows, that is really a misnomer as it doesn’t ping anything really, but simply does a tcp connection attempt to see if the port on the destination side is answering. This is actually a really cool tool in my book, so I wrote my own in PERL since I couldn’t find something similar. Basically, you call the script, give it a destination, a protocol (TCP is used by default), and a payload to deliver if you want to send something, otherwise it simply tries to connect to the port specified. I have used it for a while now, and it has come in handy for troubleshooting network connections.

The script was posted in our forums, why don’t you take a look for yourself, and let us know what you think!