RedHat | Will Chatham

Fedora 11 – Intel / ATI – KMS bugs with video drivers

Published by DB Cooper on 6/23/2009

f11release

Starting in Fedora 10 (but disabled by default) Red Hat Fedora started providing the KMS Framework.

Fedora – KMS page: Click Me

X.Org – KMS page : Click Me

Now if you’ve upgraded/installed the new Fedora 11 (or even Ubuntu 9.x etc.) KMS is enabled by default and you may have noticed there are new/still some regressions in the kernel and certain Intel and ATI cards may have issues.

If you’re having some crazy issues, fear not, you may have an answer here.

Intel Video Issues: Click Me

Ati/AMD Video Issues: Click Me

Note: This isn’t Fedora specific, you may have noticed you cant even enable desktop effects in Ubuntu 9.0.4 under certain cards (without de-blacklisting)

This is just the natural progression of trying to make things better and part of the growing pains that going with non-enterprise distros of Linux can give it’s users……but end the end, it will be worth it.

HTH.

Redirecting root’s Email on Red Hat

Published by Will Chatham on 6/19/2009

If you are a conscientious system administrator, you like to keep tabs on your server by checking root’s email at least once a day, correct? If you manage more than one server, or get tired of having to log in to check your mail, you can redirect where email for the root user gets sent.

I ran into problems on Red Hat Enterprise 5.2 doing this, so I thought I’d post the resolution here.

User Management: Passwords

Published by Will Chatham on 6/8/2009

This applies to RedHat Enterprise 4 & 5, and by association to Fedora and CentOS. It probably works on some other distros as well, but your mileage may vary.

I am constantly having to reset user passwords, as I use the “three failures and your account is locked” schema, as well as set passwords to expire every 60 days.

30% off coupon for Dell Latitude

Published by DB Cooper on 3/28/2009

I hardly ever trust the coupon sites floating around on the net, but I figured what they hey, it can’t hurt to try one.

I’ve really been wanting a Dell Latitude D630 series (yeah it’s an older model, on the 800 bus etc.) but, it IS the perfect laptop when looking to run 100% of any version of Linux and works with all the major “Security Tool” CD’s. ;0)

Rescan the SCSI bus w/out rebooting

Published by DB Cooper on 3/28/2009

Just in case the article dissapears (it happens). This is a edited version of the following.
“How do I rescan the SCSI bus to add or remove a SCSI device without rebooting the computer?”

To add or remove a SCSI device explicitly, or to re-scan an entire SCSI bus without rebooting a running system:

SWAT in 60 seconds

Published by DB Cooper on 3/14/2009

Q. What is SWAT?
A. It’s the “Samba Web Administration Tool”

Q. What can I use it for?
A. (shrug )Maybe to quickly setup a SAMBA server etc. 😉 from following my previous howto.
A2. It does have some good info even if you don’t use it for your SMB configuration.

We all know it’s best to use the command line interface (CLI) when learning something,
and most GUI tools don’t give you all the options anyway. However, it’s nice to have a GUI tool when you’re in a rush or you just want to try something new without digging for hours.

This article assumes you have already installed SAMBA. See my previous article if you haven’t.

According to the SWAT docs, it will overwrite you current SMB.conf,
so you may want to backup your current one first.

# Backup the current smb.conf
sudo cp --preserve=context /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.pre-swat

# Install the SWAT tool
sudo yum install -y samba-swat

# Set the service to launch and start it up
sudo vi /etc/xinetd.d/swat (change the disable from yes to no) sudo /sbin/service xinetd restart

# Browse to
http://localhost:901/

* Addtional Info:
http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/SWAT.html

Category: RedHat