linux

In preparation for my latest course in the AWS Networking Deep Dive series, I wanted to install PowerShell Core on an Amazon Linux instance to test out cross-platform compatibility for some scripts. Specifically, I wanted to see if I could use methods in the System.Net.Dns class to perform name resolution. The dnsclient PowerShell module provides some cmdlets for this very purpose, but that module is Windows-only, and I needed something that would work on across different platforms.

I know what you’re thinking. “Why use Visual Studio Code instead of the PowerShell ISE?” Well, if you’re using Mac OS or Linux, you don’t have the option to use the PowerShell ISE natively. And that’s a problem if you want to take advantage of the cross-platform capabilities of PowerShell Core. In this article, I’ll show you how to use Visual Studio Code (free!) to perform the key functions of the PowerShell ISE, namely:

Recently I had an Oracle database server used by some developers that was running out of space on its data volume mounted at /u02. The volume was a simple MBR volume (think fdisk), so it couldn’t be non-destructively extended without using a third-party utility like gparted. That would have been fine, but rather than leave the volume as MBR, I decided to create a new iSCSI SAN-backed Logical Volume Manager (LVM) volume, which can be extended and resized pretty easily.

In this post, I’ll show you how to create a logical volume stored on an iSCSI SAN. Even though I did this on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 (RHEL), these steps should work on any distribution of Linux.

Recently I needed to build a multipurpose file server to host CIFS and NFS shares — CIFS for the Windows users, and NFS for VMWare to store ISOs. It needed to utilize back end storage (NetApp via iSCSI), provide Windows ACLs for the CIFS shares, and be able to authenticate against two different Active Directory domains. After careful consideration, I decided to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 (RHEL) instead of Windows Server 2012.

Now you might be wondering, “Why on earth would you want to build a Linux file server to do all that when you can just use Windows?” There are a few reasons:

If you are running XenServer 5.6 FP1 or later, there is a little trick you can use to improve network throughput on the host. By default, XenServer uses the netback process to process network traffic, and each host is limited to four instances of netback, with one instance running on each of dom0’s vCPUs. When a VM starts, each of its VIFs (Virtual InterFaces) is assigned to a netback instance in a round-robin fashion.