Unix Server Tech is a repository of technical knowledge, applications and scripts for use offered to the general public, provided by the technicians at Daily Data, Inc. Daily Data, in Dallas, Texas, US, has been providing IT Services to small businesses since 1995.
Note: Everything we have put out has worked for us (unless otherwise noted), but we make no guarantees it will not eat your computer or mind. The software and procedures come with no warranty at all. Use them at your own risk. Just like the licenses say.
Please feel free to offer corrections to scripts or the Knowledge Base by e-mailing us. You can do this easily by filling out the Contact Us form at http://dailydata.net/about-us/contact-us/
This domain (unixservertech.com) has two main parts; the knowledge base and the applications/scripts. Larger applications are listed in the menu on the left, and this site is the source for most of the documentation, while small utility scripts are collected in one (very ugly) page described below.
- https://kb.unixservertech.com
A knowledge base. This is just some notes and procedures we have learned over the years, and want to share with others. Note that our old knowledge base is stored at http://wiki.linuxservertech.com. It is still active, but no new articles will be posted there, and many articles will be slowly duplicated to the Unix Server Tech Knowledge Base. - https://unixservertech.com/scripts/
A collection of scripts and programs we have written. They are all licensed either GPL or BSD, and most of them are Perl or PHP scripts. We are slowly packaging some of these and they will be added here as we build installers. Note: most of these were written and tested using Debian Linux, but many will be tested on FreeBSD over the near future.
Philosophy
You might ask, why Unix Server Tech instead of Linux Server Tech (which we still use)?
We have been using Linux since the mid 1990’s, but feel most of Linux has chosen to move into the workstation/laptop market at the expense of servers. A case in point is the recent forced upgrade of Debian Linux to use System-D, which we feel is beta software, at best. In initial tests, too many instabilities arose for us to be comfortable with a Linux Distribution we have used for a couple of decades. There are some distributions which implement System-D very successfully, but none I feel comfortable using on a server.
Our workstations can run unstable software, and most likely will continue to use Debian derivatives for the foreseeable future. However, our servers are not the place for unstable operating systems; if we wanted that, we’d use Microsoft products.
We are slowly moving to FreeBSD for our servers. FreeBSD has never, as far as we can see, worried about workstations too much. Instead, they are, and have been, extremely stable platforms for servers. Since most of Daily Data’s work is with servers (Unix, Apple OS X and Microsoft Windows), we must choose what is best for that. You will see an increasing number of articles in our Knowledge Base about FreeBSD, and some notes on the trials and tribulations of a Linux Sysadmin learning how to move around in it!
While we are aware of the excellent work being done at the Devuan project (https://devuan.org/) to build a more stable version of Debian, our servers need action now. We use FreeBSD where we can, and Devuan where our decades of experience in Linux are required.
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