(The things you find when you’re spring cleaning, lemme tell ya… yeesh! In addition to posting this here for posterity, I’m also now cross-posting to my personal blog archive at http://adeleshakal.com/wordpress/2000/12/ — some of this is rather dated now, but some of it is still as pertinent as it was over eight years ago.) These…
As you may have heard, LOPSA will be teaching classes for SCALE U and will be doing a booth at SCaLE this year. All things SCaLE U can be found at http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/conference-info/scale-u SCaLE is fast upon us and we need volunteers for the booth and to assist with the classes. We are specifically looking for…
How to Suck at Information Security Some of my favorites are: * Require your users to change passwords too frequently. * Expect your users to remember passwords without writing them down. * Don’t cross-train the IT and security staff. * Expect end-users to forgo convenience in place of security. * Lock down the infrastructure so…
I heard a couple of jokes the other day: Q: What’s better than going to the Southern California Linux Expo, one of the top Linux events in the country? A: Attending classes I’m teaching at SCaLE U, a joint production of SCaLE and LOPSA. Q: What’s worse than my contrived jokes? A: Nothing. Just please…
As I wrote in much more detail on my Confessions of a SysAdmin (CoaSA) blog, LOPSA is partnering with SCaLE on training classes to bring you SCaLE University! Read more about it at SCaLE’s site or the LOPSA Press Release. For my more in-depth treatment on the subject, please see the CoaSA post. I hope…
Shameless Self Promotion: Head on over to my blog where I pontificate about what I think 2009 has in store for us: http://mindlessadmin.blogspot.com/2008/12/yet-another-list-of-predictions-for.html
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…
I wrote a shell script mash-up of “find” and “cp”, and here is the feedback that warmed this sys admin’s heart: I was looking for someone to quickly write a linux shell script involving recursive copies and regular expressions, taking into account both time and space complexity. After a few candidates thought they could do…
===Last time….=== In my [last post|http://lopsa.org/node/1711] I talked about some of the more common ways to get performance numbers out of your storage: __hdparm__, __dd__, and __bonnie++__. These tools are pretty good at what they do: measure the performance of a single drive, single LUN, or single filesystem. For many sysadmins, that’s all you need…
I’ve been reading with horrified interest about the state of collapse in Zimbabwe. I’ve heard several public health experts remark that the rising deaths from cholera are a sure sign of the total collapse of the state of Zimbabwe.
Cholera is a disease that is easily prevented with modern sanitation, and even when it breaks out, is easily stopped with hydration and inexpensive medicine. For people to be dying on a mass scale from cholera shows that the state has completely failed.
Not to minimize such a horrific situation or equate it to the economic situation we’re facing here, but it did get me to thinking: what are the tell-tale signs of an IT organization in collapse from neglect or lack of funding? I have my own thoughts, but want to get some discussion going first. What do you think are sure signs that an IT organization is collapsing?
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