Installing and configuring Linux is something I do infrequently enough to forget a lot of little details, like "This is going to be a headless system. How do I not start X?" (Answer: Edit /etc/inittab and change runlevel to 3) and "What are all of these strange processes listening on sockets, and how to I shut them down/off?"
Moving bits off to a backup server before repartitioning (to make a proper /home partition this time) took longer than expected, largely because we discovered that the switch between the boxes was (a) 10Mbit, and (b) flakey. Crossover cable to the rescue.
Now I'm waiting while the CDs spin, after which I'll struggle through more small stuff I've forgotten, like how to set up MySQL and PostgreSql, and which settings in httpd.conf need tweaking. Then comes the fun part: Sorting out what's changed in mod_perl land between RH8 and FC3.
Part of me thinks I should do this more often.
Here's a nice tip for Linux:
netstat -lpt
An easy to remember combination of switches that means “list listen sockets”, “print the name and PID of the corresponding process”, and “TCP sockets only”, respectively. The -p for showing the process names is the trick here of course. Then you just go grepping init scripts.
Re:ââ¬ÅWhat are those processes?ââ¬Â
dws on 2005-01-07T15:30:32
That beats netstat -a | less by a bit. The problem for me, though, is sorting through all of those processes (and FC3 seems to have added some new ones), deciding which are really important. Why do I have an nfslock process without nfs? Do I really need rpc stuff? (Probably No.) Etc.
That's the problem with picking this stuff up every few years rather than weekly or monthly. (Other than periodically installing updates, which I do, having learning the hard way that even if I ignore an openssh exploit, some teenager in elsewhere won't.)
