Back in 2006 I started My SysAd Blog on Blogger as a place to keep the commands and fixes I kept looking up at work. Terse UNIX HOWTOs, shell one-liners and troubleshooting notes, most of them written on Solaris. In 2008 it moved to mysysad.com, after I'd worried for a while that the traffic would dry up overnight. It didn't, and the blog kept going until 2014, when it went quiet.
When mysysad.com came back as a toolkit, the old posts were gone. Any old link or bookmark just led to an error page, and that bugged me. So I rebuilt all 429 posts from my old Blogger export and put each one back at its original address. A link like this one works again, exactly as it did in 2008.
www.mysysad.com/2008/04/reset-user-account-password-example-for.html
What changed
- Only small fixes, so the posts display correctly. The rest is the way I wrote it back then.
- Every post has a note at the top about what has changed since. Most were written on Solaris, and a lot of it is history now.
- Every post also reminds you to check commands, options and file paths against your own system before using them on a live one.
- Most posts end with a link to the tool on this site that does the same job today.
Finding things
The Archive page lists every post by year and month. You can search titles and topics, or narrow the list to one topic, such as Solaris & Sun, Shell & text, or Networking & mail. Each year and month has its own page too, like 2008.
Fair warning: some of these are very much of their time. There are posts about Solaris zones, Sybase logins and the Vista On-Screen Keyboard. But a surprising number of the shell one-liners still work today, and that was the whole point of the blog.
Next up, new posts. It's been a while.