Introduction

It is possible to reconfigure the system just as if it were a new install. This is possible when you add or change your hardware on the system.

On SPARC hardware you startup with

boot -r

On x86/64 hardware you edit your grub startup by pressing e when the prompt appears then e again when the multiboot kernel line is highlighted. Now you can edit your startup options. Append the following on the end of the line.

-r

Press return to save your edit and b to boot up that modified entry.

-Ron

Introduction

With the upcoming release of leopard there are many changes under the hood. One of the small but quite annoying changes if you are used to the old ways is the removal of the NetInfo manager application. This is a blessing in disguise because the new implementation of user creation and account management.

Create the users home directory

sudo mkdir -p /Users/USER

Creating the users primary group

sudo dscl . -create /Groups/USER
sudo dscl . -create /Groups/USER PrimaryGroupID UID

Creating the user and setting options

sudo dscl . -create /Users/USER
sudo dscl . -create /Users/USER RealName "USER FULL NAME"
sudo dscl . -create /Users/USER NFSHomeDirectory /Users/USER
sudo dscl . -create /Users/USER UserShell /bin/SHELL
sudo dscl . -create /Users/USER UniqueID UID
sudo dscl . -create /Users/USER PrimaryGroupID UID

Setting the users passwd

passwd USER

Adding users to a secondary group

sudo dscl . -append /Groups/OTHERGROUP GroupMembership USER

Set the ownership of the users home directory to the users home dir

sudo chown -R USER:GROUP /Users/USER

There are some rumblings around the web using GlassFish to host rails applications to offer a simple deployment option instead of the traditional mongrel cluster and reverse proxy frontend. I am currently looking deep into the issues other both scenarios and will report my findings as soon as I make a education conclusion. Stay tuned.

If you need to remount a in-use filesystem like / or /usr without rebooting the operating system, use the mount command with the -o remount option.

To remount the root partition using settings found in /etc/fstab.conf run:

mount -o remount /

This is handy if a filesystem has been mounted read only during a recovery process. For example to remount the root partition read/write do:

mount -o remount,rw /

If there is no /etc/fstab entry for the root partition (or any partition you are using) you may need to specify the root partition (/dev/sda1 in this example):

mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda1 /