Just submitted an article on Cfengine 3 to the Sys Advent Calendar blog
Just submitted an article on Cfengine 3 to http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/ – I guess it’ll be a few days before it’s posted.
When all else fails, the Hail Mary pass can sometimes actually WORK….
Like many of you, I like to have some of the latest technology at my fingertips. Specifically, I’m talking about my workstation. No, while I don’t have über-fast sexy hardware, I like to at least have the latest OS flavor(s) installed so I can play with new features. The other day I decided it was…
Small PF revelation
I use OpenBSD’s packet filter, PF, and am in the middle of building a new router/firewall with a moderately complex ruleset. I generally code rulesets the same way I write shell scripts: adding small bits and testing. My basic ruleset was preventing routing, and the logs kept telling me that the routing packets were being…
When is a directory not a directory?
I love it. Just when I start getting a little bored…, something comes along that basically makes me go, “WTF?” – and ends up giving me a chuckle in the end. There’s stuff that’s broken, and then there’s stuff that’s REALLY broken…. Very recently, we’ve been tasked with helping migrate key components of an old…
Use dblatex to generate PDF’s from DocBook XML
After much tearing out of hair, learned to use dblatex (not passivetex) to generate PDF’s from my DocBook XML. Runs faster and smoother – that is to say it actually generates the PDF instead of just spewing out LaTeX errors.
Focus-follows-mouse, autoraise, window resize or move w/shortcuts, on MacOSX
Coming from a rather hardcore X11 background (mm, X10 with b/w displays), my adjustment to Life With Mac has been made much easier recently with the installation of a utility called Zooom/2. [2] Although it can’t (yet) bind my X11 finger-macro of alt+mouse2+move to window-move, it can bind it to any combination of modifier keys,…
S P WHAT?
The cool thing about being a sysadmin is you’re always learning – whether you want to or not… Today I sent an email to a colleague from my corporate email account, and while we were IRC’ing about other stuff– he told me that no, he didn’t get the email. Huh. I double-checked my sent-items folder–…
Getting AsciiDoc -> DocBook XML -> PDF pipeline working on CentOS 5.3
I’m trying AsciiDoc to obviate the XML “tag soup” I am eating with my DocBook docs. There were two things I had to tweak to get the asciidoc .TXT -> DocBook XML -> PDF pipeline working on CentOS 5.3: 1. Remove or comment out every mention of the “–nonet” switch in my xmlto (v0.0.23) (xmlto…
Check the cable. No, really- check it.
Today I was working with my DBA on a server migration– the replacement server is configured, loaded, secured- and before we lit it up, she asked me to take one special final full cold backup. No problem! …until I started monitoring the backup (to estimate when it would be done) – and was seeing well,…
How I got my salary to six figures as a Unix sys admin.
This is not the ONLY or even the BEST way to do it – this is just my way. I took 10 years to travel this path, and I made many friends along the way. In a nutshell, I took about 7 years of routinely working 12 hour days, plus 2 years practicing dealing with…