ServerFault will be giving away LOPSA memberships to top contributors, details at the ServerFault blog: http://blog.serverfault.com/post/free-lopsa-memberships-for-top-server-fault-users/

Why it’s hard to define and collect Best Practices… http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2011/01/sysadmin-best-practices.shtml

Getting ready for PICC? Here’s Matt’s interview with Justin Lintz http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2011/01/picc11-interview-with-justin-lintz

This is a thoughtful look at our dependence on email as the hub of our online identity and the risks of a personal email account compromise. I use two factor authentication every day (RSA token) and frankly, I’d love to have a password vault for all my online passwords, that used two factor. http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2010/12/bootstrapped-authentication.shtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Sysadmin1138+%28SysAdmin1138+Events%29

Fred Lloyd is a ham and sysadmin. His site, QRZ.com is one of the largest ham radio sites in the world. He just moved it into the cloud. an interview with Fred Lloyd (AA7BQ), publisher of QRZ.com

Egyptian authorities “turned off the net” by forcing ISPs to withdraw BGP routes. http://gigaom.com/2011/01/28/how-egypt-switched-off-the-internet/ If asked to do this in your country how would you respond?

World IPv6 Day is June 18. Are you ready? World IPv6 day is coming – June 8 2011

One topic that is sure to get our membership interested is talking about outreach, or how to let people know about LOPSA. (The other topic is the name, but that’s for another post, maybe 😛 )

One way to build “brand awareness” is rather simple: just show the logo. You don’t need to write about LOPSA (unless you want to), but just displaying the LOPSA logo on your web site will help raise awareness.

Unlike other organizations, we’re rather “open source minded” about the logo. We don’t require advance permission, we don’t want contracts, and we don’t want any control over your content in order to use our logo.

Just link it. It’s that simple. In fact, to make it even easier to “show the brand”, the wonderful LOPSA tech team have already provided the HTML in convenient cut and paste form: https://lopsa.org/logos
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As recently as last Summer, “real” information on using EC2 and other cloud providers was hard to come by. By “real” information, I mean accounts of actual hands-on use of clouds by system administrators. Marketing hype, CIO ROI “data”, CSO “security fears” and other low-signal information was everywhere.

Given the recent questions and discussions on LOPSA email lists, cloud isn’t going away, but there seem to be some questions about how to tell when a cloud solution is more appropriate than your own hardware or managed hosting.
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I’ve been collecting information about all the places that our members are blogging, and I’m seeing an amazing amount of excellent content.

While LOPSA’s roots are in the UNIX/Linux community, many of our members are also responsible for Windows and other platforms. One aspect of being multi-platform people is knowing how to do the same kinds of tasks on all the various platforms.

Here’s a great blog where the authors take an important task, and then have UNIX and Windows experts demonstrate how to perform this task on that various platforms.

Enjoy!

http://blog.commandlinekungfu.com/
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