Will our kids have a future…

I have kids and hope to have grandkids some day, but I have very concerned if there will be a world for them to grow up in. Right now the trend data shows that the world temperatures will increase by 6 degrees Celsius creating a planet that will be barely inhabitable.
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A Question for the Community

Recently I posed a question on IRC that sparked an interesting conversation:   "For those of you that have been around the industry for awhile, what is the biggest difference you see between the people you came up with and the newest generation of sys admins?"   To further expand on this and open the…

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Book review of “Team Geek” from O’Reilly Press

O'Reilly press just released "Team Geek".  Instead of publishing my review twice I'll leave you with a link to my review published on sasag.org — http://www.sasag.org/2012/07/20/book-review-team-geek/ — and the advice to go read this book! This is not a self-help book but it does cover some very useful skills for system administrators (and developers, and…

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replacement for thunderbird email client?

We're starting to have serious problems with Thunderbird here. Starting with hanging when trying to send email (RHEL 6's latest thunderbird RPMs) to losing configuration data/settings (OS X & RHEL 6) to other more subtle signs of doom. Additionally, Mozilla has announced that they are no longer actively developing it aside from security: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2012/07/adjusting-the-way-thunderbird-is-managed/ So…

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New Scam?

On Tuesday we had an employee work his final day at my place of employment. As he was leaving, he returned all of his IT equipment, as is standard practice at pretty much any company where you're given equipment for your job. The interesting twist though is that today he called and said there was…

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Changing the “From” address in emails generated by scripts

  Here is a convenient way to set the From address in emails generated automatically (for example report jobs run from cron):       echo be good | mutt -s 'message from Santa'  -e 'my_hdr From: Santa.Claus@NorthPole.org'   mutt's my favorite command-line emailer.   It is featureful and highly customizable.   www.mutt.org   

Computers, Networks and murphys law

Computers, Networks and Murphy's Law While on vacation recently good old Murphy's law came up and bit me. In my selection of a vacation rental I made sure it had broadband access so in case I had to put out fires at $WORK I could easily connect. Also for the ride there I had my…

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What is Object-Oriented Programming?

There is a remarkably lucid (and brief!) explanation of object-oriented programming at http://www.aonaware.com/OOP1.htm This is something I've tried to clear up twice before and given up.  Boy, am I glad I found the above explanation! Aleksey

IPv6 Day is here, are you ready?

If you are a sysadmin of any kind of system or network, you should at least be passingly familiar with IPv6 Day.  If not, you're living under a rock.   You might not have deployed it yet, but you should at least be familiar with how the available IPv4 addresses are vanishingly small and that…

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