Hello! I'm Kent Brodie – I currently work as a Senior Sysadmin for the Medical College of Wisconsin supporting the area of genetic research. (If anyone has a few hundred terabytes of disk to spare, please send it my way..). I was recently asked by members of the LOPSA board to run as a candidate…
“My name is Kent Brodie. I’m a sysadmin.” (The scene: the location is a kind of dingy classroom in a building that was once a school. In one of the rooms, there is a circle of chairs, all occupied by other sysadmins. They’re wearing mostly jeans and t-shirts. Together [but not quite], they respond in unison “Hi Kent….”)
OK, time to get serious: While this really isn’t an AA meeting, the above tongue-in-cheek example reflects a little of what LOPSA is like at this stage: a bunch of sysadmins gathered together, and supporting each other. But, at least in my opinion, the circle is too small – and the word needs to get out even more as to who and what LOPSA is, and does. LOPSA is a unique organization – it’s the only organization for system administrators of its kind. At its core, LOPSA is indeed a perfect place for sysadmins to “support each other”. But, LOPSA needs to grow, and be SO much more.
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Oh boy. So, it’s been um.. yeah, a very long time since I posted. I guess I didn’t have anything “interesting” to write about. Until today again. Sysadmining is like that sometimes. Today’s topic: Truecrypt. Specifically, in RedHat. For those not familiar with truecrypt, it’s a rather cool “volume encryption” too, available in the open…
Like probably almost anyone reading this blog, I’m a sysadmin. Specifically, I consider myself to be a pretty darned good one – years of experience, blah blah blah. One of the personality traits a “good sysadmin” has, is the drive and ability to learn new things. COMPLICATED things. No fear. Try out installing and setting…
OK, not related to work, but worthy of a blog entry at least. The other day I dove into VOIP for the first time. I admit, I’m a bit of a holdout with regards to my home phone service. I’m also old enough to recall the days when the phone in our house plugged into…
Like many of you, I like to have some of the latest technology at my fingertips. Specifically, I’m talking about my workstation. No, while I don’t have über-fast sexy hardware, I like to at least have the latest OS flavor(s) installed so I can play with new features. The other day I decided it was…
I love it. Just when I start getting a little bored…, something comes along that basically makes me go, “WTF?” – and ends up giving me a chuckle in the end. There’s stuff that’s broken, and then there’s stuff that’s REALLY broken…. Very recently, we’ve been tasked with helping migrate key components of an old…
The cool thing about being a sysadmin is you’re always learning – whether you want to or not… Today I sent an email to a colleague from my corporate email account, and while we were IRC’ing about other stuff– he told me that no, he didn’t get the email. Huh. I double-checked my sent-items folder–…
Today I was working with my DBA on a server migration– the replacement server is configured, loaded, secured- and before we lit it up, she asked me to take one special final full cold backup. No problem! …until I started monitoring the backup (to estimate when it would be done) – and was seeing well,…
It’s Friday afternoon, about 2pm. I have a console/management server that is having some difficulties with Splunk 4. Whether or not the RHEL version (4.8) is the cause– I have finally decided it’s time to upgrade to RHEL current (5.4). That way I can at least eliminate the OS as the cause of the issues…