January, being the beginning of the new year, is also the month when people clear out the old junk and prepare to start anew. Everyone makes their resolutions to be healthier, to exercise and eat right, to organize their lives better. I read in the paper today that January is officially the National Clean Up…
I wrote a shell script mash-up of “find” and “cp”, and here is the feedback that warmed this sys admin’s heart: I was looking for someone to quickly write a linux shell script involving recursive copies and regular expressions, taking into account both time and space complexity. After a few candidates thought they could do…
===Last time….=== In my [last post|http://lopsa.org/node/1711] I talked about some of the more common ways to get performance numbers out of your storage: __hdparm__, __dd__, and __bonnie++__. These tools are pretty good at what they do: measure the performance of a single drive, single LUN, or single filesystem. For many sysadmins, that’s all you need…
I’ve been reading with horrified interest about the state of collapse in Zimbabwe. I’ve heard several public health experts remark that the rising deaths from cholera are a sure sign of the total collapse of the state of Zimbabwe.
Cholera is a disease that is easily prevented with modern sanitation, and even when it breaks out, is easily stopped with hydration and inexpensive medicine. For people to be dying on a mass scale from cholera shows that the state has completely failed.
Not to minimize such a horrific situation or equate it to the economic situation we’re facing here, but it did get me to thinking: what are the tell-tale signs of an IT organization in collapse from neglect or lack of funding? I have my own thoughts, but want to get some discussion going first. What do you think are sure signs that an IT organization is collapsing?
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This is the story of my afternoon yesterday, Friday 12/5/08. It’s a case where the simple act of “keeping an eye on things” caught an anomaly that would’ve attracted a lot of negative attention from the business and scaled it down to a slight inconvenience.
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===Background=== In my daily work, I’ve noticed that not a lot of attention is given to benchmarking various subsystems. When a new disk array comes in, there may be a run or two of bonnie++, but that’s generally it. Network benchmarks? Generally I don’t see people run them. Maybe you don’t care; maybe there’s an…
Peter Saint-Andre (a.k.a. stpeter), Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation, patron saint of Jabber, will be interviewed on the FLOSS Weekly podcast today at 4 PM. Watch it live at 4: http://live.twit.tv/ If you don’t catch the live stream, listen to the podcast: http://twit.tv/FLOSS
If you are in the L.A. area, please come and support LOPSA Los Angeles – join us for our monthly meeting at Chipotle Mexican Grill in El Segundo. When: Thursday, Dec. 4th, 9:00 PM – 10:00 PM (after UUASC-LA gets out) Where: Chipotle Mexican Grill, 307 N Sepulveda Blvd, El Segundo, CA 90245, (310) 426-1437…
A colleague here at LISA told me yesterday that he had observed approximately a 50% drop in traffic on his E-mail servers. Naturally, this was first a cause for concern, but then he learned about the disconnection of McColo – a major botnet command and control hosting site in Northern California, USA. Their two up-stream ISPs pulled their plugs on Tuesday afternoon. See the story in the Washington Post.
Naturally, I experienced an immediate urge to check $employer’s anti-spam system for its observation on the situation.
As a sole sysadmin for a site whose primary unix-experienced backup is also out of the office this week, I am being fairly easy-going about dealing with user requests through VPN while I am at LISA. Actually, in general I am easygoing about requests that include things users could do themselves, though if they are…