IT Services - Staff

The diskdump utility offers the ability to create and collect vmcore (Kernel dumps) on a single system without needing to be connected to a network.

Diskdump creates files in an identical format to the netdump core files and can be analysed with the same tools.

Winbind is an nss switch module to map Windows NT Domain databases to Unix.

In combination with Samba and pam_ntdom, a Unix box will be able to integrate straight into a full Windows NT Domain environment, without needing a Unix Account database.

It decodes and sends new microcode to the kernel driver to be uploaded to Intel IA32 processors. (Pentium Pro, PII, PIII, Pentium 4, Celeron, Xeon etc - all P6 and above, which does NOT include pentium classics).

It signals the kernel driver to release any buffers it may hold.

The microcode update is volatile and needs to be uploaded on each system boot i.e. it doesn't reflash your cpu permanently, reboot and it reverts back to the old microcode.

This driver is designed for Intel IA32 microprocessors only, it will not work with AMD or any other non-Intel processors as they don't support microcode updates or they support it in a manner different from Intel's specs.

yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems.

It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages.

It makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

Anacron is a periodic command scheduler. It executes commands at intervals specified in days. Unlike cron, it does not assume that the system is running continuously.

Every time Anacron is run, it reads a configuration file that specifies the jobs Anacron controls, and their periods in days. If a job wasn't executed in the last n days, where n is the period of that job, Anacron executes it. Anacron then records the date in a special timestamp file that it keeps for each job, so it can know when to run it again.

Service wrapper. xinetd is a replacement for inetd, the internet services daemon.

xinetd - eXtended InterNET services daemon - provides a good security against intrusion and reduces the risks of Denial of Services (DoS) attacks. Like the well known couple (inetd+tcpd), it enables the configuration of the access rights for a given machine.

Auto-autofs detects Disks, Partitions, CD-ROMs, Floppies etc. and sets up an automount configuration.

So it provides an easy access to the hardware.

Auto-autofs is a Perl script that searches the hardware for block devices using the /proc directory. It finds partitions on harddisks via fdisk and tries to detect the filesystems.

The X font server (xfs) provides a standard mechanism for an X server to communicate with a font renderer, frequently running on a remote machine. It usually runs on TCP port 7100.

You need to be running xfs if you want a remote X terminal to be able to use fonts from your system, or if you want to use fonts that your X server doesn't understand (and the font server does).