I need to transfer about 40TB from one zfs box to another box because of a problem of initial setup in box 1 that left it without redundant raid and it now has a failing disk. ZFS points this out quite nicely, but we have to get all that data off before the disk fails…
We have a very specific short-term need: deploy a system into a room without network access so that a building automation system can be installed and the host machine can be accessed remotely. Givens: * A network will be installed into this room, but not soon enough for the need for building automation system hardware….
While waiting for my delayed flight, I had a chance to try out some of the new Pre Applications. Infopedia is one that allows you to quickly search wikipedia for any term or for fun you can look up a random page. Another feature I like is the Current Events link as it leads to…
We have a large maintenance this weekend as the electricians cutover power to a several hundred AMP 480V switch panel in preparation for bringing a large 675KW UPS online. Also, at the same time, they lumped in some plumbing work to cutover to the 14″ chilled water mains. So, in order to avoid any sort…
The premise is believable enough. There are still quite a few vendors out there that still distribute BIOS updates as a floppy image. Heck, they even make it ‘easy’ for you.. The program comes in a self-contained executable that has the image inside it. All you have to do is run the thing and put…
Say you want to strace a script.. Well, you can’t, right? Because strace expects ELF (or other object format) executables as a target, or a running process. So one trick is to put a sleep at the top of the process, start it, do a quick ps, then strace -p.. Ugly, but effective in many…
NTP 4 introduces some interesting new things that few people seem to know about, are sparsely documented, and are difficult to setup correctly, however they can help with synchronization in the event of total external network failure (even if you don’t have a reference time source). Now, some reference time sources aren’t expensive (others are),…
Luke Kanies blogs a [rant|http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/02/why_isnt_system_administration.html] on configuration management that claims that the entire state of system administration is broken. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong. The problem is, he describes a microcosm of system administration in configuration management and then goes on to conclude that all tools of all aspects of system administration suck and…
Anthony Spina writes an interesting article on the Splunk blog ([here|http://splunkideas.blogspot.com/2007/02/youve-tagged-your-it-now-tag-your-ip.html]). Using network databases like this can make distributed operations much easier. How do you tag your machines?
Some tips on publishing content Most people don’t know some of the shortcuts you can use to make content publishing easier and more useful. One of the first lessons is using interwiki to provide quick links to reference material. For some tips on using this, see http://lopsa.org/interwiki/6. Also, below the list of input…