[Cfengine|http://www.cfengine.org] is an awesome tool for managing any number of machines between 2 and 200,000. You probably already knew that. If you’re using Cfengine, you probably also know that it can get pretty verbose, especially for more complex edits. If you have a configuration file wherein order matters, adding a line suddenly becomes nontrivial. iptables…
(memo to self: Do not take on ANYTHING extra during the month before or the 3 weeks after E3.) The Ruby/Rails agile development *environment* is truly amazing, and the best “thing” I’ve ever seen for enabling rapid development. It’s been a while, but I was finally able to finish working through the sample application, the…
It was, I believe, at USENIX ’05 that I first heard about Mailping, a utility that would send an email message, check for its receipt, and report on the health of your mail system. Unfortunately, the utility had fallen into disrepair, and I couldn’t find an alternative. So I did what any hacker would do:…
I’m going to start putting together a list of folks who are willing to come to speak to local groups. Some of us have heard local folks speak on a variety of topics. We’d like to encourage them to visit other local groups as well! Is this you, or someone you know? Either contact me…
So if I were to tell my friends eight years ago that I was going to go to work for a municipal government agency doing sysadmin and automation and control work, they’d have laughed me out of the room. Despite my friends postulations that the term would be changed to “Going Aquatic,” I’ve had quite…
Like most sysadmins, I make heavy use of email. I actually run a Cyrus IMAP server on my desktop and use fetchmail to grab mail from the company server, filter it through procmail for things like analyzing cron job output and emailed logs, and then hand it to Cyrus’s deliver program, which processes it through…
So, I was reading through the May ’06 LOPSA Live transcript and came across a curious statement. [5:04p] chrisd: One of the things we can all relate to is the fact that, when everything goes right, nobody knows your name. [5:04p] chrisd: But when something breaks, everybody hounds you. [5:05p] chrisd: It’s a thankless job….
Well, today made it official. I have in my possession my Bachelor of Science and Master Degrees in Business Administration. It’s been a long seventeen years since I graduated high school and started on my advanced education, especially the first three and last four (considering I didn’t do anything about schooling for the middle ten)….
I just saw the “announcement”:http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=8933&tstart=0 my second OpenSolaris bugfix was accepted and integrated. This one is a little more substantial than the first, fixing a memory access error that didn’t check to make sure the memory location existed first. I don’t know… maybe I’ll go back to being a software developer one of these days….
I’ve always hated the “For Dummies” and “Complete Idiots Guide To” series. Maybe its just me, but I have a real problem with a book that starts out by insulting me. I wouldn’t mind seeing a series named “For the Uninformed”, at least that isn’t denegrating me. I saw to me the ultimate in these…