2013 Cascadia IT Conference – tutorial slate announced
The tutorial slate has been announced. Technical presentations have been selected (and submitters notified). Registration will be opening and full schedule will be posted in the next few days.
Author Archive: Damon, Lee
server room environment monitoring solutions?
I've been authorized to replace the home-brewed thermal monitoring system for one of the server rooms I use at work. I haven't done any research into this since building http://ssli.ee.washington.edu/people/nomad/thermalcube/ 10 or so years ago. So I turn to you to ask: What's the current hotness in inexpensive environment (mostly thermal) monitoring solutions?
Book review of “Team Geek” from O’Reilly Press
O'Reilly press just released "Team Geek". Instead of publishing my review twice I'll leave you with a link to my review published on sasag.org — http://www.sasag.org/2012/07/20/book-review-team-geek/ — and the advice to go read this book! This is not a self-help book but it does cover some very useful skills for system administrators (and developers, and…
replacement for thunderbird email client?
We're starting to have serious problems with Thunderbird here. Starting with hanging when trying to send email (RHEL 6's latest thunderbird RPMs) to losing configuration data/settings (OS X & RHEL 6) to other more subtle signs of doom. Additionally, Mozilla has announced that they are no longer actively developing it aside from security: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2012/07/adjusting-the-way-thunderbird-is-managed/ So…
2013 Cascadia IT Conference – 15 & 16 MAR, 2013
Yes, that's right, I'm already talking about next year's conference. To make sure we could get a reasonably sized room block in the hotel we've gone ahead and reserved Friday and Saturday 15 & 16 MAR, 2013 for our next conference. Go ahead, put it on your calendar, you know you want to. Please spread…
Help Bellevue College develop a SA-related degree program
From email that was just sent to the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild: Hello SASAG members, Bellevue College is planning to add an applied bachelor’s degree in Information Systems & Technology to our current certificates and two-year programs in IT. One of the planned foci of this degree will be systems and network administration. We…
calendars? We don’t need no steeken’ calendars!
I just got email from the office of the associate dean for research in the college of engineering where I work. They want people to go fill out a doodle poll so they can figure out when to schedule a meeting. When we don’t provide a necessary service the users will find a workaround. Most…
SuperComputing 2011 thoughts
I’ve just spent the last 5.5 hours wandering around the trade show at SuperComputing 2011. The trends I noticed last time SC was in Seattle (I think it was 2005) don’t seem to have changed much except for one “interesting” development which I’ll get to in a minute. There appear to be two primary thrusts…
Casitconf iOS and Android app available
Attention iOS and Android users! The conference directory is available from The Conventionist. Head for the iOS App Store or the Android Market and then download the Cascadia IT Conference’11 guide. Don’t forget to tell your friends. See you at the conference on Friday.
Pros and cons of Tape Vs. Disk-to-Disk backups
This list is written from the perspective of a smallish research lab I support and is by no means exhaustive. However, it seems a good starting point. Feel free to share your ideas as followup posts. Pros to tape: – Can be easily taken offsite – no spinning platters to jam – more likely to…