ZFS may be locked into the Solaris operating system but “Butter FS” is on the horizon and it’s boasting more features and better performance.

deep thoughts by sysadmins: Steve Stady and Seth Vidal Licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution license. 1. do it the same, over and over and over again 2. Backups are sacred! If you do not know if your backups are current, then test them by restoring the data and comparing. 3. Do not make many, tiny partitions, make a smaller number of larger partitions, instead. etc.

Linux/Mac only: Social bookmarking service Delicious is a great way to save and share your bookmarks, but what happens if they go the way of JournalSpace and lose all your data? You need backups! Since Delicious is owned by Yahoo there isn't a serious risk of complete data loss, but it's better to have a local backup of your data than risk losing your account with no recourse for data retrieval. Since there are a number of ways to accomplish this, we'll cover the geekiest method today, which was derived from but slightly different from the article linked below.

What is fakeRAID? In the last few years, a number of hardware products have come onto the market claiming to be IDE or SATA RAID controllers. These have shown up in a number of desktop/workstation motherboards. Virtually none of these are true hardware RAID controllers. Instead, they are simply multi-channel disk controllers combined with special BIOS configuration options and software drivers to assist the OS in performing RAID operations. This gives the appearance of a hardware RAID, because the RAID configuration is done using a BIOS setup screen, and the operating system can be booted from the RAID.

dotfiles.org is a place to upload, download, and share your dotfiles. Face it: you're proud of that 204-line .bashrc, and you should be! You've fine-tuned your prompt, carefully planned your aliases, and written some pretty time-saving functions over the years. Why not show off your work and, in the spirit of the open source community, share your efforts. You may even learn a few tricks.

If each Linux program had to include its own authentication logic, we'd go crazy. How could you trust that all your applications implemented the same checks? And how could you implement extra controls? PAM gives us a simple alternative: if a program needs to authenticate a user, it can call the PAM application programming interface, and that API will take care of running whatever checks you need, according to whatever rules you specify in your PAM configuration files. You can even modify your authentication mechanisms on the fly, and all PAM-aware applications will automatically start using the new authentication method. Want to use biometric controls, such as fingerprint readers or iris scanners? If the hardware maker provides a PAM, you are set; you just have to include that module in your configuration files, and from that point on your new device will be available for all applications.

Since the beginnings of UNIX, authenticating a user has been accomplished via the user entering a password and the system checking if the entered password corresponds to the encrypted official password that is stored in /etc/passwd . The idea being that the user *is* really that user if and only if they can correctly enter their secret password. That was in the beginning. Since then, a number of new ways of authenticating users have become popular. Including more complicated replacements for the /etc/passwd file, and hardware devices Smart cards etc.. PAM provides a way to develop programs that are independent of authentication scheme. These programs need "authentication modules" to be attatched to them at run-time in order to work. Which authentication module is to be attatched is dependent upon the local system setup and is at the discretion of the local system administrator.

This is comprehensive documentation for one of the most useful linux/UNIX Windows commands-dd. It is a bitstream duplicator for duplicateing data. If you have a question, post it.

Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and