Sysadmin Knowledge Base

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To enable automatic ssh inside the intel cluster, use avinash's page as a reference.

Contributed by : Abhinav ,Nilay & Pulkit
To run cgi scripts in private_html

  • Become root
  • cd to /misc/combo/httpd/cgi-bin
  • create a softlink by the name of your login to ur private_html/cgi-bin


    • Contributed by : Abhinav & Nilay
    Accessing Kanada (Windows Server on Intel Cluster)
    Homes are mounted on kanada using Samba. Samba server is running on desh. All users have a defaul password already set; to override this and create a new password, root access is needed.
  • Become root
  • run "smbpasswd"


    • Contributed by : Abhinav & Pulkit
    Enabling XDMCP on machines
    XDMCP runs on port 177 using UDP.
  • Check if server is already up by "nmap -sU -O localhost"
  • If need arises to start server run "gdmsetup" (as root) to enable XDMCP


    • Contributed by : Pulkit
    Mounting & Unmounting flash drives
    Flash drives are recognised as sda0, sda1 and so on.
  • run "tail -f /var/log/messages" as root while inserting drive
  • In the log note down name of device (Eg. /dev/sda0)
  • To mount run "mount -t vfat device name target directory
  • To unmount run "umount -l target directory


    • Contributed by : Advait,Nilay & Pulkit
    Changing System Date
  • For displaying date in particular format run :
  • date '+FORMAT'
  • For setting new date as Jul 20 2005 and time as 10:56run :
  • date -u '072010562005'


    • Contributed by : Abhinav & Pulkit
    Updating Aliases manually
  • For Updating aliases manually, edit the /etc/aliases file and run :
  • /root/updatealiases.pl


    • Contributed by : Abhinav ,Nilay & Pulkit
    Enabling console operations(tty operations) on FC4
  • Fedora Core 4 has an error. Its libvgahw.a is buggy because of which console gets disabled.
  • To remove this error copy libvgahw.a from an FC3 machine.
  • libvgahw.a is found in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules