Up: Assignments

Systems Administration -- Midterm Examination

Due Date: Thursday April 17, 1996

The midterm should be submitted by e-mail by midnight on Thursday April 17, 1996.

• What is fsdb? Under what circumstances would you advise using it?
• There are various directories on a unix system, such as /tmp and /usr/tmp, where users have permission to create files. Discuss potential problems that these directories present and strategies for dealing with these problems. You should also discuss the "costs" of your solutions.
• /usr/tmp on Intrepid, under HP-UX 10.XX, is filling rapidly as you watch. What system processes are likely to be responsible and what might be causing this behavior?
• Your free space on a disk is disappearing rapidly. How would you track down the offending file(s) and process(es)? If there is no file which appears to be growing what is likely to be happening?
• Create a utility which will monitor disk space. (You are to write code for this in C, the shell of your choice, sed, awk, perl etc etc.) This utility should notify a list of users when the free space on a monitored disk partition drops below a given level.
• A user process is running wild and forking child processes so that "process table full" errors are reported. How could the superuser kill such a process and what might prevent her/him from doing so? Will the same be true if the wild process is a system process?
• What is the relationship between the major and minor numbers for a device file (/dev) and the physical device (a scsi drive)?
• You have just connected a new SCSI disk and it is not detected? What could be wrong?
• Provide all information (code, config files,resources, ...) necessary to implement a system which maintains a filesystem where the age of a core file never exceeds 5 days.