HP DL380p Gen8 (p420i controller) I/O oddity on XFS partitions

XFS and EL6 have fallen into an ugly state… I’ve abandoned XFS on EL6 systems for the time being due to several upstream features/changes slipping into the Red Hat kernel… This one was a surprise and caused some panic: Why are my XFS filesystems suddenly consuming more space and full of sparse files? Since November … Read more

Upgrade CentOS 5.x to CentOS 6.x – tips and techniques

We recommend everyone run through a reinstall rather than attempt an inplace upgrade from CentOS-4 or CentOS-5! Source: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2011-July/017645.html You can run this upgrade centos6 just by using yum upgrade –enablerepo=centosplus. Do not forget: each system running centos is individual (!). I recommend you to test this upgrade on a virtual machine before upgrading (i … Read more

How to free up space on RHEL6 /boot safely?

Following command will remove ALL kernel versions, except for the one that you’re currently running: sudo yum remove `rpm -q kernel | grep -v ‘uname -r’` and for going forward, per ⁠7.4. Configuring Yum and Yum Repositories: ⁠installonly_limit=value …where value is an integer representing the maximum number of versions that can be installed simultaneously for … Read more

How to install jq on RHEL6.5

As it says on the development page for jq “jq is written in C and has no runtime dependencies”. So just download the file and put it in place with the following: wget -O jq https://github.com/stedolan/jq/releases/download/jq-1.6/jq-linux64 chmod +x ./jq cp jq /usr/bin

How do I use Linux to find unused IP addresses on my network?

Any well-behaved device on an Ethernet LAN is free to ignore nearly any traffic, so PINGs, port scans, and the like are all unreliable. Devices are not, however, free to ignore ARP requests, afaik. Given that you specify you’re scanning a local network, I find the least-fragile method of doing what you want is to … Read more

Do I need a RHEL subscription to install packages?

Yes, you have to have an active RHEL subscription to download packages from RHEL’s repositories. If your machine has never been subscribed, or the subscription is expired, you will not be able to use any of the repositories provided by RHEL. Red Hat states, in relevant part: If you choose to let all your subscriptions … Read more

Human readable format for http headers with tcpdump

Here’s a one-liner I came up with for displaying request and response HTTP headers using tcpdump (which should work for your case too): sudo tcpdump -A -s 10240 ‘tcp port 4080 and (((ip[2:2] – ((ip[0]&0xf)<<2)) – ((tcp[12]&0xf0)>>2)) != 0)’ | egrep –line-buffered “^……..(GET |HTTP\/|POST |HEAD )|^[A-Za-z0-9-]+: ” | sed -r ‘s/^……..(GET |HTTP\/|POST |HEAD )/\n\1/g’ It … Read more