When I was checking Eventbrite on the Cascadia conference registrations this morning I came across this (see below, click for full-size).

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We’ve recently had requests for our internal inventory to flag which systems have hyperthreading enabled and which don’t. This brought up the question of what’s the simplest and most universal way to detect if a given Linux server has hyperthreading enabled. The expected google searches turned up a lot of discussion but not a lot of definitive answers. With this post I’d like to offer three different tests I have found, and also open for discussion how reliable and universal these tests are, and if there are perhaps better alternatives.
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From email that was just sent to the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild: Hello SASAG members, Bellevue College is planning to add an applied bachelor’s degree in Information Systems & Technology to our current certificates and two-year programs in IT. One of the planned foci of this degree will be systems and network administration. We…

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Having screen provide session logging for each separate ssh session – this is very useful in case you ever need to “go back in time” and see what it was you did on the server Put this in your .screenrc file: # save the session logs logtstamp on logfile $HOME/.screenlogs/screenlog.%t.%Y-%M-%d.%c # the session log will…

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http://theunpixie.blogspot.com/2012/02/is-sysadmin-community-inviting-to-women_24.html

At a job interview last year, I was asked “What is your philosophy of system administration?” It’s a good question and one I hadn’t been asked before. Here’s Digital Elf on his philosophy of system administration: https://digitalelf.net/2011/09/philosophy-of-system-administration/ What’s yours?

I just got email from the office of the associate dean for research in the college of engineering where I work. They want people to go fill out a doodle poll so they can figure out when to schedule a meeting. When we don’t provide a necessary service the users will find a workaround. Most…

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Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a serious force to be reckoned with. After retiring she was also a particularly good lecturer and had effective ways of getting across points those outside the industry might not be thinking about. One of them was how she would regularly hand out 30cm pieces of wire at her talks and then later on point out that is roughly how far light travels in 1 nanosecond. We in the computing industries actually owe a lot to her and too seldom think about her era of computing history.

I was amused to see SMBC (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a web-comic that is often extremely NSFW; it is lewd and crude but in a way that points out sexism and other negative behaviours) make Grace Hopper the focus of today’s cartoon:

The webcomic may not be to your taste generally, but I hope you enjoy this one.
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I have been working with Google for 3 weeks trying to get GADS to sync our passwords from OpenLdap to Google Apps. GADS kept saying in all the logs that the password was sync’ed correctly, but no luck. I worked with Google Support and we tried everything (almost) including generating lots of debug logs that said yep the passwords sync’ed ok, but they were not sync’ed. I searched for answers on the web – no luck.
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