The title says it all. Back during my machinist days at the US Mint in Philadelphia we had a one week course in analytical trouble shooting. The course used a ficticiuous maintenance Machiinist called Ferd. Ferd always jumped to the conclusion about a problem. He walked up to a machine that wasn't working and assumed…
Escape and Control keys historically belong on the left side, right next to the “A” key in the home row: (Thanks to Wikipedia for the keyboard layout graphic.) Nowadays they have drifted away from the home row, which adds wear and tear to your fingers and steals valuable time. To get back to this key…
For the next person who wants to do this (you cant…) <neek> how can one do a proxy_set_header inside an if? <neek> apparently that's not allowed. because no one ever wants to conditionally set a header to the upstream? <mfjordvald> neek: IT's a technical limitation, not a…
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?
I'm sure I'm not alone in asking vendors to help us comply with our security rules. Clients bring in new tools that are unable to follow the security rules. In some cases, the clients aren't really at fault. The clients don't really have an in depth understanding of the security policy, or may not know…
I had an interesting interview yesterday, and learned a new technique that I thought was brilliant. I was the interviewee, and the interviewer had a few technical questions (How would you discover which program was listening on a network port?). He could have simple sat across the table from me, and read questions. Instead, he…
I have kids and hope to have grandkids some day, but I have very concerned if there will be a world for them to grow up in. Right now the trend data shows that the world temperatures will increase by 6 degrees Celsius creating a planet that will be barely inhabitable.
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Recently I posed a question on IRC that sparked an interesting conversation: "For those of you that have been around the industry for awhile, what is the biggest difference you see between the people you came up with and the newest generation of sys admins?" To further expand on this and open the…
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…
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…