By default, when the user installs software through the RPM Package Manager or through YUM, usually, the software’s configuration files included in the RPM do not replace the existing configuration files on the filesystem, but, if they differ from those that currently exist, they are saved with the rpmnew extension. In case the rpm is…
The other day I was experimenting with PostgreSQL under Windows and I was very confused setting a locale in the command line when initializing the database cluster. If I didn’t specify a locale in the –locale option of initdb, then the locale that was used was: Greek_Greece.1253. Well, I needed to initialize the cluster with…
rdiff-backup is my favorite tool for keeping backups on Linux systems. Today, I started using it on a Windows 7 desktop as well. At first, I used rdiff-backup from the cygwin project, but I soon noticed that, if I did anything else that required moderate hard disk access on the computer on which the cygwin…
I just read this very interesting article about the new 4096-byte sector hard disks, like the new Western Digital Caviar Green drives, and the impact a partition misalignment might have on the drive’s write performance.
setenforce is a command line utility that is used to switch the mode SELinux is running in from enforcing to permissive and vice versa without requiring a reboot. Lately, I’ve started experimenting again with SELinux on a live system. The default targeted SELinux policy, as usual, needs some adjustment to work with a custom server…
Usually, the only time I make a change to the timezone setting of the operating system is during the installation time. But it may happen that a change to that setting is necessary. There are several ways to do this, but, as usual, there is only one Right Way™ to set the timezone info in…
About three years ago I had posted a general guide on how to create RPM packages. According to that guide the RPM building environment was prepared using the handy utility rpmdev-setuptree (part of the rpmdevtools package in Fedora). This post describes the manual preparation of the RPM building environment.
When it comes to software for your CentOS installation, there is no such thing as a good yum configuration, but a configuration that can bring you the software you need, while, at the same time, causing the least possible trouble regarding core package upgrades. This small article goes into the details of configuring YUM using…
Having spent some days with CentOS on my desktop and having tried several 3rd party RPM repositories, I’ve finally decided to mix the official repos (base, updates, addons, extras) with RPMforge and also make use of the priorities yum plugin. Read on if you care about the details…
If there are still references to device nodes for block devices, as they are set by the kernel, for example /dev/hda, in /etc/fstab, you should seriously consider replacing them with the volume’s label or its UUID. Even if you use an LVM setup, the /boot partition shouldn’t be referenced by its device node.