One of the Masters (6th Dan) at my Tae Kwon Do school, Master Robert Gross, has developed his _Ten Commandments of Martial Arts_. He has very graciously permitted me to use the first of his commandments, “Thou shalt not block with thy face” for one of my _Black Belt Systems Administration_ topics. The first corollary…
I saw on one of the news sites (Slashdot or OSNews, forget which exactly) a story about the following [http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/10-ultimate-rules-for-effective-system-administration.html|10 Essential Rules for System Administrators]. These are mostly pretty basic and many of them are not really SA specific. I’m not certain that “backup regularly” and “test your backups regularly” are deserving of being two…
The darcs revision control system has all but lost out to git within the past few months. A rather large part of the reason is a rushed and very poorly worded release announcement, following a rather long (I’m told 4 years; I haven’t been aware of it that long, which itself is perhaps ominous) post-1.0 silence from the darcs developers: Continue reading
I’ve been posting some of my Tae Kwon Do belt test thesis papers to my blog, and for some reason they seem to be fairly popular. I’ve had an idea to start a series of posts that tie some of our martial arts lessons/philosophy to systems administration. I’m not a black belt (yet), I just…
Even people who are familiar with internal politics may not realize the extent to which technical decision-making can be a distant second, or worse, to political concerns. An extreme case is real politics:
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Why blog, indeed…
Someone on #lopsa recently asked what he should tell an auditor who wants the root account completely disabled on a Unix system. The analogy I could come up with is: Disabling root would be akin to cutting the master key to a building in half and making parts of the building unusable at certain times….
It is trivial to set things up so you are able to select memtest86 as a boot option in GRUB: Download the latest memtest source from http://www.memtest86.com. Extract and follow the instructions in the README that comes with it to compile. Copy the resulting memtest.bin to /boot and edit /etc/grub.conf to have the following 3…
I’ve recently had a number of projects at work that want to mix multiple volume managers on a single server, specifically ZFS and VxVM for SAN volumes (actually, three including SVM for internal boot disk mirroring). The projects generally are for database servers, and want to use VxVM for database volumes because ZFS currently has…
In June, I gave a presentation to LOPSA Austin of various out of band management technologies that I’ve experienced and used in my day to day work. As promised, here are the slides if anyone else is interested. This a high-level overview of IPMI, ILO, ILOM, and some third party addons and management tools. -edit-…