Just submitted an article on Cfengine 3 to the Sys Advent Calendar blog
Just submitted an article on Cfengine 3 to http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/ – I guess it’ll be a few days before it’s posted.
Author Archive: Aleksey_Tsalolikhin
Use dblatex to generate PDF’s from DocBook XML
After much tearing out of hair, learned to use dblatex (not passivetex) to generate PDF’s from my DocBook XML. Runs faster and smoother – that is to say it actually generates the PDF instead of just spewing out LaTeX errors.
Getting AsciiDoc -> DocBook XML -> PDF pipeline working on CentOS 5.3
I’m trying AsciiDoc to obviate the XML “tag soup” I am eating with my DocBook docs. There were two things I had to tweak to get the asciidoc .TXT -> DocBook XML -> PDF pipeline working on CentOS 5.3: 1. Remove or comment out every mention of the “–nonet” switch in my xmlto (v0.0.23) (xmlto…
How I got my salary to six figures as a Unix sys admin.
This is not the ONLY or even the BEST way to do it – this is just my way. I took 10 years to travel this path, and I made many friends along the way. In a nutshell, I took about 7 years of routinely working 12 hour days, plus 2 years practicing dealing with…
How to compile xtrlock on CentOS (transparent screen saver, useful for NOC display station)
Download xtrlock source code from the Debian project (I used http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xtrlock/) xmkmf make make install Then, take the first of the two gcc commands that were run by make, and rerun it manually, but add -DSHADOW_PWD to the defines section of the command line (-Dthis -Dthat -DSHADOW_PWD). (I tried to muck around with the 1000+…
I’m sharing my CFengine 2 config
I posted my cfengine config, it’s the 2nd half of my cfengine presentation to UUASC-LA (chapters 14 – 34). http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/cfengine/cfengine-presentation-to-uuasc-la-on-1-oct-2009/ Maybe it can help somebody start or expand their cfengine config. Presenting on cfengine 2 made me really excited to learn 3… as it’s promised that the cfengine language has been standardized and streamlined in…
Sending SIGQUIT (ctrl-) to ping will make it print a status line and continue pinging.
ping tip: CTRL + (backslash) confirmed on Linux
“Attention to Detail” matters
In our profession, where a single mistyped command can have catastrophic consequences, attention to detail matters. Today I am proud to have received this recommendation from my good friend and colleague, Alice Yang: “Aleksey was my mentor at Earthlink. When I first worked for him, I thought that he was very *picky*. He checked and…
Links for getting started with DocBook – and an example Sys Admin Site Documenation Book in DocBook
I recently read “Documentation Writing for System Administrators” by Mark C. Langston. In this post, I share a documenation set template written in DocBook and based on Mark’s book, some TPOSANA, and my own experience. Version 1.0 of the template: http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/sa-site-doc/ DocBook sources: http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/sa-site-doc/sa-site-doc.docbook-xml.tar.gz Why I chose DocBook: A) Theoretically, I can output HTML and…
Just discovered the handy “convert” command from ImageMagic
I needed to convert a PDF file to PNG With “convert”, it’s as easy as: $ convert rose.pdf rose.png More at http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php