Unix Archive

Using the /proc Filesystem

Submitted by Petur 2011-03-01 Unix 9 Comments

"The proc filesystem is a special filesystem found on most UNIX-based systems. It holds a great deal of information, in ASCII format, most of which is not very friendly to the average user. I've made a list of some of the files i find to be of most use."

Submitted by jimmy1971 2011-01-25 Unix No Comments

Today, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the two Bell labs scientists which began creating the Unix operating system in 1969, have been named as winners of the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications.

Submitted by henderson101 2011-01-20 Unix 1 Comment

What would have happened if the ST had run a BSD based UNIX rather than TOS and GEM? "To run Unix effectively we needed some hardware that was very fast, that was simple enough to put into a minor spin of the ST’s memory controller with little project risk, and that would still provide some kind of memory relocation and protection. The ability to have separate address spaces to isolate processes would be good, too."

Novell To Retain UNIX Copyrights

Thom Holwerda 2010-11-24 Unix 8 Comments

Good news: the UNIX copyrights owned by Novell will not fall in the hands of Microsoft as part of the IP purchase by Redmond. "Novell will continue to own Novell's UNIX copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate," states John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer at Novell. Yeppers.

Hewlett Packard Superdome Demo Day

David Adams 2009-10-29 Unix 30 Comments

I had the pleasure earlier this month of attending a demo day at HP's Cupertino campus to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the Superdome server, see what's new in the high-end server market and learn about what's going on with HP-UX.

HP-UX Gets Biannual Face-Lift

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-28 Unix 6 Comments

"Hewlett-Packard is rolling out Update 5 for the HP-UX Unix operating system that runs its Itanium and PA-RISC lines of Integrity and HP 9000 servers, keeping to its pattern of two updates per year for its flagship operating system. As has been the case with the prior HP-UX updates, the changes are important to existing HP-UX shops, but they're probably not going to cause a stampede of buyers for HP-UX systems. It's no different with the updates to IBM's AIX or Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unixes do."

UNIX Network Performance Analysis

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-09 Unix No Comments

Do you know what to do when the performance of your UNIX network and the speed at which you can transfer files or connect to services suddenly comes to a stop? How do you diagnose the issues and work out where in your network the problems lie? This article looks at some quick methods for finding and identifying performance issues and the steps to start resolving them.

Submitted by kernpanic 2009-08-20 Unix 19 Comments

"The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new - largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore's Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines. Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod. Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before."

35 Years of the UNIX Time-Sharing System

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-01 Unix 9 Comments

"Earlier this year, people in many places wrote about the 40th anniversary of the moment Ken Thompson sat down and started to work on UNIX (which is actually in August). In fact, UNIX celebrates another birthday this year, even though on a slightly smaller scale. In July 1974, exactly 35 years ago, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson published the first version of their seminal paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System in the Communications of the ACM."

Submitted by snydeq 2009-06-04 Unix 29 Comments

Gary Anthes offers an overview history of Unix forty years since Ken Thompson banged out the first version in assembly language for a wimpy DEC PDP-7 minicomputer, spending one week each on the operating system, a shell, an editor, and an assembler. Also included in the package are a year-by-year time line of its evolution, and profiles of Unix giants David Korn, Rick Rashid, and Gordon Bell.

Knee Deep in UNIX Network Analysis

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-11 Unix 4 Comments

You can find out a lot about your network by using a variety of different tools. Understanding the layout of your network, and where packets are going, and what people are doing is important. This tutorial examines techniques for monitoring the traffic and content of your UNIX network and how to read and diagnose problems on your network.

HP-UX 11i v3 Update 4 To Be Released Tomorrow

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-16 Unix 40 Comments

Even though the old-world UNIX operating systems, like IRIX and HP-UX, have been steadily losing ground to Linux for a long time now, they do still get updated and improved. HP-UX 11i v3 is supposed to get update 4 tomorrow, with a host of new features that won't excite you if you're used to Linux, but they're still pretty useful for HP-UX users.

Solutions for Tracing UNIX Applications

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-06 Unix 9 Comments

Take a look at some systems that enable you to trace the execution of applications and work out what they are doing without having to make any modifications to the source code, and even without having to stop and restart the application. See how with tracing alone, you can find and diagnose problems with just a few commands.

Guest post by snydeq 2009-03-25 Unix 11 Comments

InfoWorld's Tom Yager writes in favor of Unix in IT, which has been increasingly losing ground to Linux. "Unix matters for a reason that escapes analysts' notice," Yager writes. "It's that little circle with the R in it." Asking whether IT would rather have a vendor's promise to interoperate with competitors' systems, or a contract obliging them to, Yager stresses the importance of The Open Group's registered trademark of the Unix 03 spec. "The trademark provides IT organizations that need to be sure, without need for digging, that Unix means something, and it does. It means that Unix enterprise solutions work and work together, without regard for the brand on the hardware" -- a guarantee of interoperability that is the "product of cooperation among Unix vendors, IT operations, universities, and professional organizations."

Benjamin Franklin on Systems Administration

weildish 2009-03-10 Unix No Comments

The man has been dead for over two hundred years, but no one can deny his genius when it came to coming up with clever quotes that people would be repeating centuries after his death. Though nobody living in the 18th century could foresee the computer technology we benefit from today, Franklin's wise words can be applied to really any aspect of life, and Martin Streicher has applied ten of Franklin's famous quotes to the area of UNIX systems administration. Read the full article for some helpful hints in administration all sparked from our dear friend Franklin himself, covering everything from security to the wisdom in frugality.

Designing a UNIX File System to Improve Performance, Security

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-23 Unix 11 Comments

UNIX's method of handling file systems and volumes provides you with an opportunity to improve your systems' security and performance. This article addresses the issue of why you should split up your disk data into multiple volumes for optimized performance and security.

Stayin’ Alive with GNU Screen

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-11 Unix 16 Comments

If you've spent hours on a task, such as debugging an application, it can be maddening to lose your work in an instant. This article shows you how to keep your shell and your work alive, even across multiple sessions and dropped connections using GNU Screen. Screen is a remarkable tool that you will quickly find invaluable in any work you perform on the command line. In fact, use it once, and you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

Synchronizing UNIX Files with Optimized Security

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-02 Unix No Comments

There are many tools available that allow you to synchronize files across UNIX directories, but doing it effectively, and securely, takes a little bit more effort. This article looks at solutions for synchronizing files across UNIX filesystems and different computer systems securely, and at solutions that allow you to synchronize encrypted versions of your files for the purposes of backup.

Protothreads for UNIX

Submitted by anonymous 2009-01-18 Unix 16 Comments

Protothreads are a type of extremely lightweight threads - each protothread requires only two bytes of memory - that are usually used for embedded firmware programming, where memory is at a premium. Protothreads combine the low overhead with event-driven programming with the algorithmic clarity of threaded programming.

Submitted by weildish 2008-12-17 Unix 16 Comments

IBM's primer to Cygwin. Cygwin is a UNIX-like environment for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Cygwin includes a real UNIX shell, a Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) emulation library, and thousands of UNIX utilities ported to Windows. Learn how to drop to Cygwin and use its UNIX-like command line to manipulate the system.