Wow, I actually manage all this

My boss is trying to justify more resources so I made a list of all the stuff I am responsible for. 74 production servers with 8 major OS’s and 6 minor versions within the major versions 23 test servers 15 storage devices with 5 different OS’s 52 services How many are you responsible for?

Cool use of xargs

As part of our mail server testing we moved 10 people over to the new mail server and I used imapsync to get mail from the production mail server to the test mail server. I need to run this every 5 minutes and can run no more than 5 processes at a time. xargs allows…

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2011 Cascadia IT Conference – the details

The League of Professional System Administrators and the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild invite you to the Cascadia IT Conference – a regional workshop for Systems, Networks, Database, and Web Administrators and others who provide professional IT support/services. This is your opportunity to network with your regional peers, to learn from leaders in the field…

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Cascadia IT Conference

I have just received confirmation that the contract for the venue for the Cascadia IT Conference 2011 has been signed. We’re go for Friday and Saturday, 11 & !2 MAR, 2011 at the Hotel Deca in Seattle, WA, USA. The CfP should be out very very soon.

I’m going. Are you?

I will be teaching a full-day class with Marc Staveley on Using Amazon Web Services at this year’s LISA conference. The conference is being held in San Jose, CA from November 8 through 12 and my class (F1) is on the 12th. Come and join the fun!

My approach to problem solving

So what are we talking about when we talk about problem solving?
There are all sorts of problems sysadmins have to deal with on a regular
basis: technical problems and personal problems, immediate problems and
distant problems, easy problems and difficult problems. What I want to
address are problems of a more technical nature. I’m not going to talk much about specific tools or things like that, but rather more general topics that come to mind when I think about problem solving.
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Finally got my own blog up

Finally got my own blog up: http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/ It’ll be about configuration management, documentation, and increasing system administration efficiency.