Decade of Storage: Analysis of Data Costs

Yesterday, I noticed this interesting tidbit from Rackspace calculating the cost of data over the last Decade of Storage. Of course, there a few bumps in the road that made me chuckle. Interestingly, in the last couple of years it plots the cost from $0.40/GB to $0.06/GB. This ties together a whole bunch of things…

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LOPSA logos and your blogs

One topic that is sure to get our membership interested is talking about outreach, or how to let people know about LOPSA. (The other topic is the name, but that’s for another post, maybe šŸ˜› )

One way to build “brand awareness” is rather simple: just show the logo. You don’t need to write about LOPSA (unless you want to), but just displaying the LOPSA logo on your web site will help raise awareness.

Unlike other organizations, we’re rather “open source minded” about the logo. We don’t require advance permission, we don’t want contracts, and we don’t want any control over your content in order to use our logo.

Just link it. It’s that simple. In fact, to make it even easier to “show the brand”, the wonderful LOPSA tech team have already provided the HTML in convenient cut and paste form: https://lopsa.org/logos
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There’s lots of cloud info out there

As recently as last Summer, “real” information on using EC2 and other cloud providers was hard to come by. By “real” information, I mean accounts of actual hands-on use of clouds by system administrators. Marketing hype, CIO ROI “data”, CSO “security fears” and other low-signal information was everywhere.

Given the recent questions and discussions on LOPSA email lists, cloud isn’t going away, but there seem to be some questions about how to tell when a cloud solution is more appropriate than your own hardware or managed hosting.
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terabit networking in 1U

It’s been here for a while, but it just hit me today. I’ve got 1Tbit of networking bandwidth in 1U on my hands. 48 10/1 gbit ports (SFP+), 4 40 gbit ports (QSFP), all at full duplex and layer2/3 non-blocking. That’s an astonishing bandwidth of 1.28Tbits/sec thanks to the Fulcrum Micro chip nestled inside. at…

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OpenSSH and Keychain for Systems Administrators

This tutorial provides guidance on best practices and configuration of OpenSSH/Keychain, but also includes some important troubleshooting techniques for which documentation is somewhat lacking. These techniques took me several years to develop and I have tried to compile them here in one concise post so that others do not have to suffer through the arduous…

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Passion for the Science of Computing

I recently read an article called ā€œComputer. Science. Paradox?ā€ by Ben Rockwood which pointed me to a phenomenal project called ā€œGreat Principles of Computing.ā€ The project’s founding principle is that Computing, not Computers are the center of our study and that the Science of Computing is, indeed, a natural science. This project touches on so…

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Systems Administrator’s Lab: OpenSSH MaxStartups

When performing automation using OpenSSH/Cron you will inevitably run into concurrency problems. Recently, we had a problem where one machine was receiving 21 ssh connection within one second. This is because the standard cron daemon only has a granularity of one minute. In this article, I am going to quickly elaborate on how we spotted…

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Amazon EC2 & Rackspace Cloud Servers

Recently, I had the chance to work on a couple of projects that took me into the cloud. The first project had me setting up Eucalyptus on KVM. The second had me building out an infrastructure in Rackspace Cloud Servers. This has given me some hands on insight into the problems that are facing those…

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Incorrect or incomplete understanding of highly complex systems is a common source of problems for sysadmins

The current issue of “Communications of the ACM” has a write-up from the HCI team at IBM Research, Almaden, San Jose CA that has been studying sysadmins in their natural environment. If you missed their presentation at LISA, catch it here: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/1/103203-collaboration-in-system-administration/fulltext They mention, “Incorrect or incomplete understanding of highly complex systems is a common…

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