Even people who are familiar with internal politics may not realize the extent to which technical decision-making can be a distant second, or worse, to political concerns. An extreme case is real politics:
Continue reading
Why blog, indeed…
Someone on #lopsa recently asked what he should tell an auditor who wants the root account completely disabled on a Unix system. The analogy I could come up with is: Disabling root would be akin to cutting the master key to a building in half and making parts of the building unusable at certain times….
It is trivial to set things up so you are able to select memtest86 as a boot option in GRUB: Download the latest memtest source from http://www.memtest86.com. Extract and follow the instructions in the README that comes with it to compile. Copy the resulting memtest.bin to /boot and edit /etc/grub.conf to have the following 3…
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…
In June, I gave a presentation to LOPSA Austin of various out of band management technologies that I’ve experienced and used in my day to day work. As promised, here are the slides if anyone else is interested. This a high-level overview of IPMI, ILO, ILOM, and some third party addons and management tools. -edit-…
Example ZFS configurations for a Sun x4500 with 24TB of raw disk. Two disks are held for OS, leaving 46 available disks for ZFS. One 45 disk raidz2 zvol across 6 controllers. Most disk, but very slow performance. ~21TB space. zpool create -f thumper raidz2 c0t1d0 c1t1d0 c4t1d0 c5t1d0 c6t1d0 c7t1d0 c0t2d0 c1t2d0 c4t2d0 c5t2d0…
Every sysadmin, network admin, and DBA has their own toolbelt of vital timesavers and lifesavers they use to pull themselves out of a jam or avoid problems before they arise. Half the game is finding the good tools – the other half is sorting out how they work.
Plenty of sites help you find the tools you need but few point out the tools that would be elevated from good to great if only the documentation was as good as the tool. I aim to fix that with the first ever LOPSA Underdocumented Tool Challenge!
Send us your nominations for best underdocumented tool by July 6th, we’ll publish the top 10. The best nomination will win a prize of my choosing.
Continue reading
The LOPSA blog is nice but I sometimes get frustrated by the editing tools Drupal provides. I also sometimes want to blog about non-system-administration related things and don’t think this is a great place for that kind of content. As such, I’m going to start using Blogger instead. My new blog can be found at:…
Something is in *my* blog.