2009 Predictions

Shameless Self Promotion: Head on over to my blog where I pontificate about what I think 2009 has in store for us: http://mindlessadmin.blogspot.com/2008/12/yet-another-list-of-predictions-for.html

moving blog; AH/USENIX/LOPSA suit thoughts

The LOPSA blog is nice but I sometimes get frustrated by the editing tools Drupal provides. I also sometimes want to blog about non-system-administration related things and don’t think this is a great place for that kind of content. As such, I’m going to start using Blogger instead. My new blog can be found at:…

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Why monitor?

I read the following blog post about automated testing in software projects which made me think about how “monitoring” is the system administration equivalent. I’ve never thought about this analogy before, but I think it’s valid and I might try floating it at work, seeing as we’ve been doing some monitoring enhancements lately. (More below the cut…) Continue reading

simple helpful stuff: reverse search in bash

I’ve been a bash user for several years (8?) but someone just showed me this trick about a year ago, and now I honestly can’t live without it. Control-R at bash prompt will allow you to quickly search your bash history in reverse order. It’s not a full search, you can only type a few…

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Things that rock: PXE Booting Acronis

I’m doing some work on fixing up our build and provisioning environment, and found the following blog post for booting Acronis via PXE: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/network-administrator/pxe-aka-pre-execution-environment-and-acronis-part-2/ I ended up using the kernel and ramdisk from the Acronis Universal Restore CD which seemed to work just fine. Sadly, my wifi at home is acting just funky enough that…

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Sun Who?

Catching up on blogs yesterday in the airport, these two posts popped up right after each other in my Google Reader: http://storagemojo.com/2007/11/29/opensolaris-the-universal-storage-platform/ http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=876 Which just strikes me as… odd.

Fedora Core 6 EOL in December

Max Spevack blogged today to remind everyone that with Fedora 8 due out early next week, Fedora Core 6 will be EOL in about a month. If you’re running FC6, now is about the time to think about upgrading.

Keeping your INBOX empty

I’ve been busy lately, so I’ve been catching up on my RSS feeds in Google Reader on Saturday mornings while having coffee. This morning I read a post from 37signals that, among other things, mentioned keeping your email INBOX as empty as possible. I’ve seen lots of other people mention this and I can’t understand why this is such a big deal. I guess it’s a personal preference. A “less is more” stance to email management.

To me, “more is more” when it comes to my INBOX … Continue reading