sernet.de maintain the latest Samba releases in a yum repository, allowing for an easy and painless install or upgrade of Samba on your yum based Linux distribution.
To install the latest available Samba execute the following commands at the shell:
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d # wget http://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/experimental/centos/5/sernet-samba.repo # yum install samba
To upgrade an existing Samba install:
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d # wget http://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/experimental/centos/5/sernet-samba.repo ## Note: edit sernet-samba.repo and add the line "gpgcheck=false" otherwise ## it will not install as it is not signed
# yum update samba
Note: These steps will install the very latest build available at sernet.de.
If you require a less bleeding edge version of Samba, use the "tested" repo. This can be found at the following URL: http://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/tested/rhel/5
DirectoryIndex default.rsp index.html
If you have a live linux site that is running vmware virtual machines, you can pause the virtual machines when you want to perform a backup, I use acronis for linux which does incremental backups and you can specify a command to run before and after the backup, this allows backups to be performed at scheduled times daily without any intervention. In my examples below, the virtual machine i want to control is in /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
To pause the virtual machine on linux:
# vmrun pause /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
and then to unpause after the backup has completed:
# vmrun unpause /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
That is basicallty it, no need to attend the backup and it can be perfomed at a suitable time so no users are affected.
Incidentally, vmrun lets you startup a virtual machine at system startup too, without needing the GUI:
# vmrun start /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
Or alternatively stop it:
# vmrun stop /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
There are lots of other capabilities of this command, running applications inside the virtual machine etc etc. For full details just type vmrun in a terminal window.
Occasionally as a Linux administrator you will be in the situation where working on a remote server and you are left with no option but to force a reboot the system. This may be for a number of reasons, but where I have found it most frequent is when working on Linux clusters in a remote location.
When the "reboot" or "shutdown" commands are executed daemons are gracefully stopped and storage volumes unmounted.
This is usually accomplished via scripts in the /etc/init.d directory which will wait for each daemon to shut down gracefully before proceeding on to the next one. This is where a situation can develop where your Linux server fails to shutdown cleanly leaving you unable to administer the system until it is inspected locally. This is obviously not ideal so the answer is to force a reboot on the system where you can guarantee that the system will power cycle and come back up. The method will not unmount file systems nor sync delayed disk writes, so use this at your own discretion.
To force the kernel to reboot the system we will be making use of the magic SysRq key.
The magic_SysRq_key provides a means to send low level instructions directly to the kernel via the /proc virtual file system.
To enable the use of the magic SysRq option type the following at the command prompt:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
Then to reboot the machine simply enter the following:
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
Voilà! Your system will instantly reboot.
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The Recital Oracle Gateway requires the Oracle libclntsh.so shared library. If this file is unknown to ld.so.conf, add it using the ldconfig command.

If you have software packages which you wish to share with others or simply between your own personal machines, a neat and easy solution is to create your own YUM repository and provide your .repo file for download.
YUM is by far the easiest method of installing software on Red hat, Centos and Fedora. Not only does it mean you don't need to trawl the web looking for somewhere to download the packages, YUM does a great job of satisfying any package dependencies. As long as the required packages are available in the enabled repositories on your system, YUM will go out and get everything you need.
To create your own YUM repository, you will need to install the yum-utils and createrepo packages:
yum install yum-utils createrepo
yum-utils contains the tools you will need to manage your soon to be created repository, and createrepo is used to create the xml based rpm metadata you will require for your repository.
Once you have installed these required tools, create a directory in your chosen web server's document root e.g:
mkdir -p /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
Copy the rpm's you wish to host into this newly created directory.
The next step is to create the xml based rpm metadata. To create this use the createrepo program we installed earlier.
At the shell type the following command:
createrepo -v -s md5 /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
This will create the required metadata in the repodata directory of your /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates directory.
root@test repodata]# ls -l rwotal 44 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28996 Jan 13 21:42 filelists.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 284 Jan 13 21:42 other.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1082 Jan 13 21:42 primary.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 951 Jan 13 21:42 repomd.xml
To do a final consistency check on your repository run the following command:
verifytree /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates
We now have a fully functioning YUM repository for our hosted rpm packages.
The next process is to create a .repo file in the client systems /etc/yum.repos.d directory.
Navigate to the /etc/yum.repos.d directory on your system as root.
Using your preferred text editor to create the .repo file. In this example I will call it recital.repo.
Now paste in the following lines:
[Recital] name=Recital Update Server baseurl=http://ftp.recitalsoftware.com/repo/recital/updates enabled=1 gpgcheck=1
Once that is saved, at the shell prompt on the same machine (YUM client system).
$ yum repolist Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit repo id repo name status Recital Recital Update Server enabled: 1 adobe-linux-i386 Adobe Systems Incorporated enabled: 17 fedora Fedora 12 - i386 enabled: 15,366
As you can see the Recital repo is now being picked up and we have access to all the packages it is hosting.
See how easy that was!