There’s been a change at LOPSA recently.  Less talking, more doing.  My name is William Bilancio and I am proud to be part of that change. 

Recent accomplishments:

• 2 new chapters: I helped LOPSA start NYC, and Baltimore/DC chapters by sharing my experience from running LOPSA New Jersey.
  
• 3 successful conferences: I chaired the inaugural PICC 2010, mentored Cascadia IT 2011, and coordinated the hotel/food and audio visual contracts and getting all the trainers for PICC 2011.  All three were profitable before the doors opened.  A combined total of more than 150 new LOPSA memberships were gained and put over $9,000 in LOPSA’s bank account.  Both events are now annual.
  
• First web-site upgrade in 5 years.  With Dan Rich, a huge effort to upgrade a highly customized CMS to a standard release, without losing any content, accounts, or data.  In doing so, the membership and renewal system is working again.
  
• Hosted the LOPSA board retreat at my office in NJ to save money.
  
• Member and chair of the LOPSA Education Committee since 2005, coordinating our efforts at SCALE, OLF and more.

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For starters: I’m an Emacs mage (two more levels and I’m a wizard!) learning vi, and a Perl guru who mostly writes Python these days. That should tell you a lot about me right there. In my time as a member of LOPSA, I’ve served on the Tech Team and the Education Committee, which gave…

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Reading Ted Dziuba’s article Monitoring Theory article, I was reminded of several conventions that I have developed over the years to help with monitoring servers, network devices, software services, batch processes, etc. First, break down your data points into levels so that you can decide how to route them. Second avoid interrupt driven technology like…

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I want to thank those who asked me to run for the LOPSA Board. I have been a member of LOPSA since its inception. During the early years of LOPSA I was just a member that used the mailing list and web site to help resolve issues at work. With the PICC’10 conference I answered…

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I have been a member of LOPSA since the very beginning and have been proud to serve on the board of directors for the past two years. In that time we have seen the creation of the mentorship program, an updated web site, a new membership system, and cost cutting measures to bring us well…

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“My name is Kent Brodie. I’m a sysadmin.” (The scene: the location is a kind of dingy classroom in a building that was once a school. In one of the rooms, there is a circle of chairs, all occupied by other sysadmins. They’re wearing mostly jeans and t-shirts. Together [but not quite], they respond in unison “Hi Kent….”)

OK, time to get serious: While this really isn’t an AA meeting, the above tongue-in-cheek example reflects a little of what LOPSA is like at this stage: a bunch of sysadmins gathered together, and supporting each other. But, at least in my opinion, the circle is too small – and the word needs to get out even more as to who and what LOPSA is, and does. LOPSA is a unique organization – it’s the only organization for system administrators of its kind. At its core, LOPSA is indeed a perfect place for sysadmins to “support each other”. But, LOPSA needs to grow, and be SO much more.
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Recently, I set up vsftpd on RHEL5 with SSL and it was significantly easier than I had suspected it would be. I wanted to quickly share the methods I used to set up the server, test from a client, and verfiy everything was encrypted. I chose FTPS (FTP over SSL) with vsftpd as opposed to…

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The logs are an approximation of reality and they cannot be taken as canonical or gospel. This is true in several senses. Logs can give insight to the standard investigative questions of who, what, when, where, and why, but almost always requires other information to truly answer all of these questions. Today, Postfix reiterated this…

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Oh boy. So, it’s been um.. yeah, a very long time since I posted. I guess I didn’t have anything “interesting” to write about. Until today again. Sysadmining is like that sometimes. Today’s topic: Truecrypt. Specifically, in RedHat. For those not familiar with truecrypt, it’s a rather cool “volume encryption” too, available in the open…

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Read this today on #lopsa

<kcb> OK, so if you want to know where all your support dollars for computer companies go?..
* kcb has a server. Server started logging a “CPU1 VTT” error the other day.
<kcb> $vendor recommended “reseat the cpu”.
* kcb told vendor “OK, send me some thermal compound, ok?” to which vendor said… sure.
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