Udev creates and removes device nodes in /dev, based on events the kernel sends out on device discovery or removal. In other words, Udev is the system that maps hardware devices to files you can interact with in the /dev directory. Udev runs in user space and creates points in /dev when the kernel detects and recognizes new hardware as it’s attached. It’s only been around since 2003/2004. All modern distributions use udev instead of the now depreciated hotplug.

I found the easiest way to get all the dependencies out of the way was to attempt to install Fedora’s oprofile, oprofile-devel, and oprofile-gui through YUM. But instead of installing them, just find out their dependencies and install those.

You may find that grub is pretty useless when your menu.lst is missing or misconfigured. It’s not easy to figure out how to make grub tell you where the files are that you need. Here’s how to find what you need in order to boot, just using the grub bootloader.

I changed the kernel semaphores and ip local port range as usual in /etc/sysctl.conf for an Oracle 11g install, and what happened?

In Ubuntu, Fedora and other systems I’ve seen rsyslog running on, to see the console messages you have to have physical access to the server usually through a KVM or IP-KVM setup. Kernel messages are sent to /dev/console while mail, crit, debug, and others get sent to files. Any of these message can be monitored remotely…

I usually make my boot partition ext2 because it doesn’t stay mounted and doesn’t get written to unless i’m installing a new kernel or tweaking the options like vga=0×317 or whatever. But strangely enough, when I boot, grub sees the boot partition, grub.conf, and the kernel and loads with no problem. But when I try to mount /dev/sda1 from a shell it doesn’t seem to know what i’m talking about!

In a shell script you’re probably testing a variable against some constant or another variable, but why not run a command in a subshell and compare the output?  You could even compare the output of two subshell commands!  I guess most of the time i’m doing something like this i’m …