POSIX = “Portable Operating System” + Unix http://www.stallman.org/articles/posix.html

Long-time dream come true, I’ve taught a class at a USENIX conference. My initial sysadmin training consisted of on-the-job-training at EarthLink plus at least 1 conference a year (USENIX and/or LISA). That was the culture at EarthLink, you just HAD to go to USENIX conferences to be a professional sys admin. I used to say…

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Here is a great website for learning more about the powerful tool of regular expressions: http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

A full day of Cfengine 3 training at USENIX conference by yours truly: http://www.usenix.org/events/fcw11/training/tutonefile.html#f1

This script will insert a timestamp at the start of each line you feed it. Example use: vmstat 1 | ./insert_timestamp.pl — cut here — #!/usr/bin/perl # insert a timestamp into the data stream use POSIX strftime; while ($_ = ) { print strftime (“%d%b%Y-%H:%M:%St”,localtime(time())); print $_; } — cut here —

Try this query: If you have many columns in table, or long data in a column, when you do a “select * from my_table” in psql, in the output, the columns get broken up and smeared across the screen, and you have to squint to read the screen. Here’s the fix. Use extended display: x…

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The third edition of the SWEBOK is due out this year. System Administration could use this fairly mature guide to a neighboring body of knowledge as a model for our own guide to our body of knowledge.

The current issue of “Communications of the ACM” has a write-up from the HCI team at IBM Research, Almaden, San Jose CA that has been studying sysadmins in their natural environment. If you missed their presentation at LISA, catch it here: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/1/103203-collaboration-in-system-administration/fulltext They mention, “Incorrect or incomplete understanding of highly complex systems is a common…

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Had a great presentation on illumos (www.illumos.org) from the project head last night at the Unix Users Association of Southern California, Los Angeles chapter meeting (www.uuasc.org). Several top Solaris developers have created, from Oracles’s last CDDL release of OpenSolaris (and these releases have stopped, there’s no more OpenSolaris), an open-source fork of Solaris. They’ve filled…

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To find the parent table name given a TOAST table (which is kind of like a spillover table, for data too big to put in the regular table – it’s too big to fit into one row; so it goes into multiple rows and is compressed) which has a name like pg_toast_12513885, cast the OID…

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