I have been a member of LOPSA since the very beginning and have been proud to serve on the board of directors for the past two years. In that time we have seen the creation of the mentorship program, an updated web site, a new membership system, and cost cutting measures to bring us well…
“My name is Kent Brodie. I’m a sysadmin.” (The scene: the location is a kind of dingy classroom in a building that was once a school. In one of the rooms, there is a circle of chairs, all occupied by other sysadmins. They’re wearing mostly jeans and t-shirts. Together [but not quite], they respond in unison “Hi Kent….”)
OK, time to get serious: While this really isn’t an AA meeting, the above tongue-in-cheek example reflects a little of what LOPSA is like at this stage: a bunch of sysadmins gathered together, and supporting each other. But, at least in my opinion, the circle is too small – and the word needs to get out even more as to who and what LOPSA is, and does. LOPSA is a unique organization – it’s the only organization for system administrators of its kind. At its core, LOPSA is indeed a perfect place for sysadmins to “support each other”. But, LOPSA needs to grow, and be SO much more.
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Recently, I set up vsftpd on RHEL5 with SSL and it was significantly easier than I had suspected it would be. I wanted to quickly share the methods I used to set up the server, test from a client, and verfiy everything was encrypted. I chose FTPS (FTP over SSL) with vsftpd as opposed to…
The logs are an approximation of reality and they cannot be taken as canonical or gospel. This is true in several senses. Logs can give insight to the standard investigative questions of who, what, when, where, and why, but almost always requires other information to truly answer all of these questions. Today, Postfix reiterated this…
Oh boy. So, it’s been um.. yeah, a very long time since I posted. I guess I didn’t have anything “interesting” to write about. Until today again. Sysadmining is like that sometimes. Today’s topic: Truecrypt. Specifically, in RedHat. For those not familiar with truecrypt, it’s a rather cool “volume encryption” too, available in the open…
Read this today on #lopsa
<kcb> OK, so if you want to know where all your support dollars for computer companies go?..
* kcb has a server. Server started logging a “CPU1 VTT” error the other day.
<kcb> $vendor recommended “reseat the cpu”.
* kcb told vendor “OK, send me some thermal compound, ok?” to which vendor said… sure.
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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.
As anybody who has read my column before, Oracle has gone out of their way to push my buttons. It really takes a lot to get me to come out *publicly* about a vendor, but Oracle, you do, oh you do… 1) Flash is *not* better. It just isn’t. What’s wrong with an HTML interface…
The following was originally posted at morgajel.net.
As a system administrator, monitoring is a key job responsibility, yet arguments seem to arise on how to implement it (usually with people who won’t be paged at 3am). Before writing this, I looked around for an article on the goals and philosophy of system monitoring, but found very little that really applied to this topic. Hopefully this will help set some expectations for admins, managers and stakeholders on what you should monitor, and why it should be monitored.
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Why it’s hard to define and collect Best Practices… http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2011/01/sysadmin-best-practices.shtml