Looking for proposals for workshops to be held at LISA ’07.

One-day workshops are hands-on, participatory, interactive sessions where small groups of system administrators have an opportunity to discuss a topic of common interest. Workshops are not intended as tutorials, and participants normally have significant experience in the appropriate area, enabling discussions at a peer level. However, attendees with less experience often find workshops useful and are encouraged to discuss attendance with the workshop organizer.
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Last night Sun held it’s first Austin Solaris User Group meeting at Painter Hall on the UT campus. The event was reasonably well attended with ~15-20 people from various companies and academia around Austin. The meeting was broken up into two parts: a presentation about new features in Solaris 10 release 11/06 and a discussion…

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Hmmmm, exploring blogs as sysadmin tools. I have several blogs, and mostly ignore them all.

Phrases that always bode ill … ‘hold my beer, this is gonna be cool’ (WormMan) “How much do you know about unix” (at maintenance hour) “oops” (Strata) “Are you busy…” (doubly so if it starts with a call on, say, Saturday night) “I know you’re busy, but..” (Strata) “All I wanted to do was …”…

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Ok, so I know that Redhat doesn’t recommend upgrading Fedora by changing your yum repositories and doing a yum upgrade. However, it got me from Core 2 to Core 3 to Core 4. I couldn’t understand what harm it could be to use it to go to Core 5. Yes, I’m behind, but not like you might think. I actually started this a couple of months ago before my daughter was born; I’ve been a little busy since then.

I did my normal procedure and did the upgrade. Everything appeared to go fine, the downloads happened, the new packages installed, there weren’t a whole lot of problems to work over. Then I tried to reboot to the new kernel. And the booting stopped after udev. Since I didn’t have a lot of time that day, I went ahead and booted back to the Core 4 kernel, and everything worked. Fast forward a couple of months, without having to reboot my system….
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Yesterday I emailed (http://lopsa.org/pipermail/discuss/2007-February/002048.html) the LOPSA discuss mailing list concerning my desire to finally learn how to program. Tom Perrine (calls himself a grey beard), responded and said that he and others of his ilk, have a hard time imagining a sysadmin that doesn’t know how to program. When Tom started out, he spent 15…

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Well, I finally joined lopsa. I’ve been slack in actually doing it but I think the organization is well worth it. Not sure how much I’ll blog here… I have an existing blog at http://www.sysadminblog.com I also have a Planet aggregation of general sysadmin feeds and related topics. Suggestions for feeds to add are welcome!…

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By now, I’m sure everyone with a Sun system has heard about the widely disseminated vulnerability in Solaris 10’s telnetd code. My experiences in managing that issue from early announcement to patch might serve as a warning/aide to others who are looking at security models. Several lessons were learned as a result of the experience….

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I’ve been reading the long thread kicked off by Luke Kanies’s email about the state of system administration as illustrated by the current tools. A minor subthread touched on why there aren’t more books about system administration theory, what that theory is, and so forth. A couple of mathematical topics were briefly mentioned, and it…

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Recently, Sun announced an initiative called Project Blackbox. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s something they call a “virtual data center”. But, it’s real and physical. You can touch it, hear it, move it, and … as the Sun guy said, taste it if you like. (Personally, I wouldn’t, I don’t know where that…

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