January, being the beginning of the new year, is also the month when people clear out the old junk and prepare to start anew. Everyone makes their resolutions to be healthier, to exercise and eat right, to organize their lives better. I read in the paper today that January is officially the National Clean Up…
Systems administrators are magical wizards that know everything and can make computers sing, dance, and do various other parlor tricks. As someone who carries the title, everyone assumes you can do the same. Whether it is a brand new application that no one has ever seen before, a telephone system that has nothing to do…
One of the Masters (6th Dan) at my Tae Kwon Do school, Master Robert Gross, has developed his _Ten Commandments of Martial Arts_. He has very graciously permitted me to use the first of his commandments, “Thou shalt not block with thy face” for one of my _Black Belt Systems Administration_ topics. The first corollary…
I saw on one of the news sites (Slashdot or OSNews, forget which exactly) a story about the following [http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/10-ultimate-rules-for-effective-system-administration.html|10 Essential Rules for System Administrators]. These are mostly pretty basic and many of them are not really SA specific. I’m not certain that “backup regularly” and “test your backups regularly” are deserving of being two…
I’ve been posting some of my Tae Kwon Do belt test thesis papers to my blog, and for some reason they seem to be fairly popular. I’ve had an idea to start a series of posts that tie some of our martial arts lessons/philosophy to systems administration. I’m not a black belt (yet), I just…
I’ve recently had a number of projects at work that want to mix multiple volume managers on a single server, specifically ZFS and VxVM for SAN volumes (actually, three including SVM for internal boot disk mirroring). The projects generally are for database servers, and want to use VxVM for database volumes because ZFS currently has…
It is not the extraordinary that no one else *can* do But the ordinary that no one else *will* do
Late last year, I started to take Tae Kwon Do lessons. It started out because my son was interested, and I wanted to encourage him. I found out that there is a veritable Tae Kwon Do legend living in the Columbus area and teaching just a few miles from my house. Sr. Grandmaster (9th Dan)…
I’m trying to put together some of my technology roadmap for 2008 at my current job. Until I get an update from Sun under our NDA, here’s what I’ve found on the web about the next Solaris 10 update: * Due Spring/Summer (sometime between April and June) * CPU capping of zones through means other…
My very wonderful wife just got me the coolest present. !http://www.rushbackstage.com/store/assets/images/products/rush/Accessories/RU00002012L.jpg! Totally awesome out of the blue gift. I’ve been a huge Rush fan for years, and this is going to have a place of honor on my office wall. Each month has historically “significant” events listed on some of the days, such as January…