Linux

Create a VM Template for Rocky Linux 9

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Midjourney rendering of Linux VM Templates

It’s fairly easy, but not entirely straightforward, to create a good Linux VM template on VMware vSphere. You’ve come to the right place, though! Let’s walk through all the steps needed to create a reliable, small, and secure VM template on VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation using Rocky Linux 9. Create a New VM First, we need a fresh VM. Make new VM the latest virtual hardware version you can. See “Upgrade VM Hardware Versions” for more discussion on this. Choose the right operating system. In this case, Rocky Linux is in the list. Alternately, you could choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 for EL-family Linux distributions. I create …

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What is an Inode?

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An image generated by Midjourney depicting people with hats looking at a skyline, connected with wires, with blobs in them that could be inodes

An inode, short for “index node,” is a data structure used by Linux filesystems to store metadata about a file or directory. Each file and directory in a Linux or UNIX filesystem is associated with a unique inode number. The inode contains essential information about the file or directory, such as: It’s important to note that the inode itself does not contain the file’s name or the actual data. Instead, it serves as a reference point for accessing the file’s metadata and locating its data on the disk. Inode Structure and Limits Each filesystem has a fixed number of inodes, which is determined when the filesystem is created. The number …

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Delete Files With Special Characters

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Midjourney-generated image of a man standing in water looking at a city skyline with stars above

I use SecureCRT for my terminal application, partly because it supports native zmodem transfers, and that makes moving files back and forth between my desktop super easy (if you have lrzsz installed you can just “sz filename.txt” to send something over). Occasionally, though, the transfer aborts and the shell vomits things to files with special characters in their names, like: $ ls -rw-r–r–. 1 plankers plankers 0 May 9 14:00 ”$’\326”y’$’\342”[‘$’\305”X’ -rw-r–r–. 1 plankers plankers 0 May 9 14:00 ”$’\370\343”4’$’\361′ How do you deal with files with special characters? There are a number of tricks that work: The inode number method is super easy to use if you have shell …

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