Operations groups I suspect are going to have real problems soon, and not from the usual causes of automation. It is very common for operations groups to not only monitor the servers, but take on trivial tasks that need to be done out of hours, sometimes even during the business day in an effort to…
Monday morning, November 7th, 2006, George Toft (CISSP) presented on the subject of Compliance For System Administrators at the Phoenix SysAdmins Days event. George’s presentation expressed the need for sysadmins to have an understanding of the requirements, areas of influence, and jurisdiction that make up various regulations and standards in place today to protect company…
A few weeks ago, in the ComputerWorld article “_Look who has access to your email_”:http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9004274, Bruce Hoard wrote about the dangers of system administrators having access to email and other files of high level executives. The article mostly focuses on technical issues such as encryption and access control software. It spends a little time on…
Or how I conquered out-of-band management with a box of serial and a power button. In the beginning When dinosaurs ruled the earth and small, mammalian critters scurried through the data center, the classic method of doing out-of-band management was via a crash cart and the laying of holy hands upon the ailing system. You’d…
This is the fourth and final installment in a four-part series covering my experiences at SA Days Phoenix; you can also read parts one, two, and three. Sorry this last installment is so late; Tuesday was a late night, and yesterday was a long flight. Anywho. Tuesday afternoon was a class on writing IT policies,…
This is the third part of a four-part series; the first two parts are here and here. This morning, I took a “broad-spectrum analysis” of communication for IT with Jesse Trucks, who deserves major kudos since he’s quite literally 25% of the instructors here. It was certainly broad-spectrum, but, luckily, Jesse guzzles coffee and talks…
This is the second of a four-part series; the first part is here. I officially hate my laptop; I had just typed a nice long blog entry, and the dodgy mouse whatsit decided that I meant “back” instead of “new tab,” so I get to retype it all. Blargh. Anyhow, this afternoon, after a free…
I’ve been asked by Hans to blog my experiences at Phoenix SysAdmin Days, so here’s the first installment. Watch for more as the days go on. I got in last night to warm, sunny Phoenix, a very welcome change from cold, windy Nebraska. Had a few “hydraulic sandwiches” with the other folks from #lopsa —…
So I’ve been working on an internal security review and discovering that the bulk of the issues I run into stem from the fact that the users don’t seem to understand the need for an audit trail. To me, security consists of confidentiality, authenticity, and the auditability. It’s easy to explain the need for the…
I finally discovered why I couldn’t do cpu scaling on my Inspiron 6000. Apparently the default kernel for FC6 is an i586 kernel. It also doesn’t work with acpi-cpufreq. It’s broke. It no-workie. How do you make it work? Why, you install the i686 version of the kernel! Simple you say? Oh sure, you just…