(This was originally posted at morgajel.net. Preface While system administrators often have many different goals, here are two that seem fairly universal: Automate the redundant tasks Hand off the simple tasks I’ve recently found that the build utility Jenkins can be a major boon for an Operations team, and wanted to share my findings with…
Being a Python newbie, and having just converted my home SCC repositories from Bazaar to Git on OS X Lion, I thought I’d write up a basic how-to guide. I used Tailor, written in Python, to do the conversion. I decided to gain some fluency with Git after attending WordCamp Las Vegas recently, since many, many folks are using GitHub to publish their projects.
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We nearly tripled our USB thumb drive write speed by changing the partitioning and aligning the filesystem with the parititioning, following “Increase USB Flash Drive Write Speed” http://linux-howto-guide.blogspot.com/2009/10/increase-usb-flash-drive-write-speed.html
LISA was awesome this year. I’m publishing my notes on Toby Oetiker’s presentation on his two new projects, remOcular and Extopus. 1. RemOcular is a technology stack for enabling a generic but cool web interface to UNIX command line tools. There is a JavaScript framework called qooxdoo with which you can run complete applications in…
Conversations on #lopsa reminded me I have a blog here. Been playing with ‘release management’ for work’s roll of RHEL. Now playing with putting the OS (or at least what we need to build it) into SVN.
Sometimes when you login to a Solaris NFS server, there is so much going on that you can hardly get anything done. Guds takes forever, ps takes 30 seconds, and you make little progress. Fortuitously, it’s very easy to adjust your scheduling priority on the CPU so that you can get things done. Once you…
I’ve just spent the last 5.5 hours wandering around the trade show at SuperComputing 2011. The trends I noticed last time SC was in Seattle (I think it was 2005) don’t seem to have changed much except for one “interesting” development which I’ll get to in a minute. There appear to be two primary thrusts…
I don’t post here often, but this one is important. Make your reservations for LISA, now! Don’t miss the early registration deadline, it’s coming up soon and can save your organization significant money and increase your chances of getting to go! LISA is in Boston. Nevermind the weather, Boston is a great town and the…
I recently “upgraded” my home file server to OpenIndiana 151a. It was more of a sideways migration, really, since it was previously on Solaris 10 u8.
Anyway, I noticed a big performance hit on NFS after switching to OpenIndiana. Initially I thought it was an issue with some slower disks I installed, as I also added two 3TB 5400 rpm Hitachi disks in a new ZFS mirror immediately after the migration. Further testing showed the existing 3 disk raidz pools also exhibiting the poor NFS write speed, though, so I rejected that theory.
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I recently came across blog post by morgajel from February on The Philosophy of Monitoring, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I really could have used this document several ago when I had my own run in with problems caused by over monitoring and explaining them to management.
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