Explain the importance of installing and running portsnap after installing a current version of FreeBSD.
Portsnap is a system for securely distributing the FreeBSD ports tree. Approximately once an hour, a “snapshot” of the ports tree is generated, repackaged, and cryptographically signed. The resulting files are then distributed via HTTP.
The first…

Recently, I wanted to confirm that I was running the 64 bit version of the MySQL server as opposed to the 32 bit version… one of my admins had made a symlink from the mysql/bin directory to the 64 bit binary directory. On the command line, you could no longer tell if the mysqld…

Oracle just announced a new line of Nehalem based x86 servers and they are beasts:

The long and short of it for me seems to be that the machines are beasts but power hungry beasts. None of the lower power Nehalems really seem to be on the table. Until we see prices, it will be…

You can make the executable search PATH variable persistent in several ways:

1. On the system level you can …
2. On a per user level, or for the user root, you can …

You could get this message for not having the right magic cookie on the client side, or for not having a cookie at all as was apparently my case.

In my case, the developers are being authenticated against Active Directory via Samba/Winbind. Their home directories are non-existent until the first time they login via SSH….