Create home directories at login

In some situations it is important that home directories are created at login if they don't exist. Such scenarios include NIS or AD authentication, or when a local user is created without the -m option.


Identify sar -d devices in Solaris and Linux

Sar is one of the most powerful performance measuring tools available for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris or Illumos based distros, one of the issues most people encounter is mapping the disks when using sar -d.


Set up a NIS server - client

Network Information Service (NIS) is a protocol developed by Sun to allow one to defer user authentication to a server.

Increase the size of the root partition in CentOS 7, RHEL 7 on ESXi 5.5

The root filesystem is almost at full capacity. The filesystem must be increased. 
This is a VM running on ESXi 5.5.

Using LIO_Utils to create an iSCSI storage server

openSUSE / SLES is probably one of the best choices for a Linux Storage appliance. In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to use the built-in (LIO) iSCSI target and access block devices exported via iSCSI.

Configuring SSH key-based authentication

In many situations (like when using scripts to access different systems) a user needs to be able to remotely authenticate without specifying the password.

ZFS space usage demo

Zfs space demo. These steps will be covered:

1. create pool
2. create thin volume (no reservation happens on the pool)
3. create thick volume ( zfs reservers 103% of the volsize)
4. format LUNs in Linux and copy / delete files

ESXi Troubleshooting

Steps / Tools and techniques used for troubleshooting ESXi performance issues.

Remove obsolete datastore from an ESXi host fails

Scenario:  remove a LUN on the backend storage that serves a vmfs5 datastore to ESXi.

VMWare ATS locking causes LUNs to be unwritable

Adding, accessing LUNs, creating VMs or scanning and refreshing HBAs (hw iscsi) on ESX result in errors on the storage system: