Linux Troubleshooting

When I first started working on Linux, I am interested in knowing how some of our Linux gurus in some online communities/forums/groups/user groups got started troubleshooting in Linux. So here i am going to tell you how to do Linux troubleshooting which I started back in 2004 when i am in my finial year B.E.


Quick way of doing troubleshooting
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1)When I had a problem i will first look in to error either on console or log files which are most of the time located in /var/log folder
2)If I still unable to find the root cause of the issue i will just Google it by just pasting the error code,most of the times i will get answers here if the issue is some what basic.
3)Then post the issue in online forums,groups and orkut communities,Definitely experts will help you.
4)Discuss with your seiners and friends who are in this Linux administration and try some thing.
5)Last but not least try this if the servers are not in production environment restart the service and try to see you are able to resolve the issue and still if you face the issue try to reboot the server.

Long way of doing troubleshooting
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1)Study much about man pages,help pages on system and online documentation such as http://tldp.org/

2)Participate in online

* forums(example www.linuxforume.com,www.nixcraft.com etc)
* groups(yahoo groups is best place and the google groups)
* Communities in orkut.com
* Read Linux blogs such as http://www.cyberciti.biz/


3)Start with something you wanted to accomplish, for example, long time back i want to read one of my CHM format file in Linux which is by default not supported so I did a lot of googling. When
I got as far as I could, I would then ask people who knew more.
I think that's one way to start--find something specific you want to
accomplish and figure out how to do it. Usually, in the course of doing
it, you'll learn additional things that will help you with your next
issue.
4)Learn about other distro's which will improve your cross OS knowledge best place to learn is http://www.distrowatch.org. Just downloading distros and dual booting to them.
5)Always update your self with latest technologies in linux

these are my personal experiences which I learn, please let me know your way of troubleshooting.

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Logical Volume Manager (LVM) in Redhat linux

Configuring LVM.. Please watch full video and comment on it so that we can currect our mistakes..
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The following video shows how to configure LVM sit and relax and see the video..




Unconfiguring LVM:In this video you will see how to unconfigure the LVM step by step..




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Soft link Vs Hard link in Linux/*NIX

Guest post by Sasi..


                                          Soft Link (Symbolic Link) & Hard Link
Soft Link

• Soft or symbolic is more of a short cut to the original file....if you delete the original the shortcut fails and if you only delete the short cut nothing happens to the original.
• A 'soft link' is a symbolic link to another file either on the same file system or a different file system. A 'soft link' may span file systems while a 'hard link' must point to a file on the same file system.
• A soft link (or symbolic link) is just a way of accessing files (or directories) without moving them. You just have to associate the path of the file with a special type of file (a link) which will lead you directly to it. It is called soft by comparison to a hard link which has different properties.
• A soft link is basically a file that contains the absolute path of the file it is pointing to. The file system tools simply know to follow the link in the file. This allows us to link across the system

Hard Link

hard link is more of mirror copy....does something to file1 and it appears in file 2
deleting one still keeps the other ok
Difference between hard link and soft link
Hard links share the same inode. Soft links do not.
Hard links can't cross file systems. Soft links do
In Linux, as in commercial Unix systems, the 'ln' command is used to create a symbolic link in file systems. A 'hard link' is a link pointing directly to a specific inode on the same file system.

An example of a partial 'ls -al' listing of a single line from a /dev directory on a Linux system which illustrates the appearance of a symlinked file follows:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Jan 13 22:05 cdrom -> hdc

In this example, the /dev/cdrom device is symlinked to the /dev/hdc device making them effectively one and the same though with different names. The leading 'l' in the 'lrwxrwxrwx' permissions listing indicates that the listing is a symbolic link. [JMH]
A hard link basically assigns another physical pointer to the same piece of data. This creates a limitation as it requires that the data be on the same logical disk as the link pointers location is designated by the inode of the data.


This is first guest post on my blog,Author of this post is having 4 years extnsive knowledge on most of the *NIX flavors you can reach him @ Sasikanth Padigala (spadigala@gmail.com)

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