Suse & OpenSuse Tips » administration

Installing HP LaserJet 1020 Printer for OpenSuSE

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:41:07 +0000

Printers such as the HP LaserJet 1020 (1000, 1005, 1018, 1022 inclusive) are usually detected by the various Linux distribution. However, there seem to have little success in ensuring that the printer drivers installed works.

Luckily for us, there is a driver that works very well with OpenSuSE (I have also tried it with Ubuntu and SuSE Enterprise) and it can be found here.

Installing has never failed for me and the steps are basically (detailed instructions can be found at that site),

Download it
Untar it
make
sudo make install
sudo make install-hotplug
make cups
yast2 printer

It has been working for me each time I install a new PC/Server with SuSE or OpenSuSE. Great tool and please do donate to their effort.

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Installing HP LaserJet 1020 Printer for OpenSuSE

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How to start services automatically at boot?

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:56:28 +0000

In the traditional sense, when we want to include a new service at boot time, we looked into the /etc/init.d/ directory and figure out where to put it. (I tend to look and figure it out as it changes over the years).

In many other distribution, they provide various ways to do this and to ensure that it is correctly configured. In SuSE and OpenSuSE, they provided the command insserv for this purpose.

# insserv –r hwscan

If you would like to stop the scanning of hardware configuration at boot time. Normally, this is turned on but when you have the server configured and running optimally, you may want to disable it to ensure a faster boot up time. To start it again at boot up time, just

# insserv hwscan

Of course, YAST also provide this, go to YaST Control Center –> System –> System Services (Runlevel).

Where you can enable/disable the services.

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How to start services automatically at boot?

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Differential backup script sample

admin — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:01:22 +0000

We should regularly backup our servers (and PCs and notebooks) and if you are running a production server, backing up as regularly as possible should be considered. However, backing corporate servers which are full of emails or shared documents can take hours. We can probably only do so on the weekends. So, what happens when we need to restore some data at the end of the work week? Does it mean that we will loose all our data that we created or modified earlier on in the week, since we only have last week’s backup?

In reality, we don’t need to do a “full” backup each time we backup our servers, we can do “differential” backups. Differential backups are basically backups of of all the changes since the last “full” backup. In other words, only the difference since the last “full” backup.

A simple script to do differential backups for users’ home directory from Monday to Thursday and full backups on a Friday is as below.

#!/bin/bash
if [ `date +%w` -eq 5 ] ; then
if tar -cf /tmp/bck-full-`date +%F`.tar /home ; then
touch /var/log/bck/last-bck
tar -tf /tmp/bck-full-`date +%F`.tar > \
/var/log/bck/bck-`date +%F`.log
else
mail -s “Backup failed” root < ~
fi
elif [ `date +%w` -gt 0 ] && [ `date +%w` -lt 5 ] ; then
find /home -type f -newer /var/log/bck/last-bck | \
tar -cf /tmp/bck-diff-`date +%F`.tar -T -
if [ $? ] ; then
tar -tf /tmp/bck-diff-`date +%F`.tar > \
/var/log/bck/bck-`date +%F`.log
else
mail -s “Backup failed” root < ~
fi
fi

Of course, you will need to ensure that those directories used are already there and run the backups as root. (Note, script edited to fit the width of this posting, so if you have errors, please leave a comment).

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Differential backup script sample

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How to temporary disable users

admin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:05:55 +0000

From time to time, we will need to disable users. This may be prior to the permanent deletion of the user account or just as a precautionary step.

As root, you can easily disable a user account by

# usermod –L

Or you can just add an ! in front of the 2nd field (the encrypted password) in the /etc/shadow entry of the user.

To re-enable the user, you can

# usermod –U

This will unlock the user, or simply put, remove the ! in front the password field of /etc/shadow.

If you would like to permanently delete a user, you should use

userdel –r

to also remove their home directories. Note that in a typical administration, you would usually keep the home directory in case of the need for their data.

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How to temporary disable users

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How to create user with password assigned

admin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:56:56 +0000

If you create new users (as root) using

# useradd –m tux

You will have created a newuser with it being disabled. This means that the password entry (the 2nd column) in the /etc/shadow will have a ! as the entry, i.e.

tux:!:14343:0:99999:7:::

You can use a script to go through it and change the ! to the encrypted password (which you can create earlier) but you must be aware that existing users that are disabled will have the 2nd field starting with !.

The -p option on useradd will require the encrypted password as the given parameter. This will be cumbersome if you are trying to use the script to create a set of new users and you will have to encrypt the individual passwords prior to using the useradd with the -p option.

In order to create a newuser with a password assigned, you can use

# useradd –m tux
# echo welcome | passwd –stdin tux

Or you can copy the following script and use it to create a new user with password and home directory.

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# –ne 2 ]; then
echo “Usage: $0 ”
exit 1
fi
useradd –m $1
echo $2 | passwd –stdin $1

There are other ways to do it as well, but this is an easy way to understand it. Have fun!

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How to create user with password assigned

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