I run a Zimbra mail server at the K-12 school district where I work. Overall I really like the system, but my user base is very susceptible to phishing spam so once a month or so someone will give up their password to a spammer who then proceeds to use our mail server to send…
For me there were two primary take aways from LISA’13. The first is that because of the “internet of things”, the fact that we carry phones with us everywhere, and that data collection and storage costs become much smaller than the costs to sort through data to determine what data to keep; we have ubiquitous…
I feel that LOPSA is poised for a time of growth. We are getting more interest from system admins, from companies who cannot find system admins to hire, and from students who are starting to realize that system administration is a good career. I have been focused on improving LOPSA's communications with it members and prospective members by putting out the LOPSAgram on a monthly basis, posting to social media sites about LOPSA events, representing LOPSA at several conferences such as SCALE, LinuxfestNW, LISA, and ACPENW via working the booth and giving talks, mentoring several people at work and via the mentorship program along with co-chairing the Cascadia 2012 IT Conference. I have also been involved in setting up a new 4 year system admin degree at Bellevue College in Bellevue, WA.
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One of the wonderful things about the bash shell on *nix systems is that history persists between sessions so you can easily reuse commands. Unfortunately, this is not built into powershell on windows, but you can get close to it by putting this into your profile.ps1 which is read each time you start up powershell….
Weds is starting out great with Aleksey talking to folks about his poster right outside our table
So a major webfilter vendor has a huge bug where they do not filter https connections that include an '&' in the URL. For a school district this is a very bad thing because we are not filtering any connections to google sites (e.g. images and videos are the big ones). The solution is to set up BIND to only redirect www.google.com to nosslsearch.google.com. This forces the connection to a non-https connection so the webfilter will work correctly. Continue reading
I work for a K-12 school district that uses Macs as the primary client machines. Currently our students log into the Macs with a generic account and use their AD account to attach to the file server. We are migrating our Mac laptops and desktops to use AD domain logins so the students can start logging in to the Macs with their AD account. One of our wonderful students decided to log in with their full name instead of their user id (student id) and it worked. Please note that you cannot login with the full name on a Windows machine joined to the domain so this is a Mac strangeness thing.
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I hit a bug on my openldap server (a virtual machine) that ate up almost all the ram and even though I restarted the openldap (a 30 second process) would only free up a bit of ram. So now the server is running in 300KB of memory and swapping with high load averages and wait…
As many folks know, vi is a pretty cryptic editor to learn. Here is a fun way to learn the commands. http://vim-adventures.com/
I needed to upgrade our 3 copies of VMware Workstation for work today. I purchase these using a corporate credit card that is managed by our administrative assistant and is in her name. In the past this has never been a problem but today… I log on to the site, go to the store, select…