I read the following blog post about automated testing in software projects which made me think about how “monitoring” is the system administration equivalent. I’ve never thought about this analogy before, but I think it’s valid and I might try floating it at work, seeing as we’ve been doing some monitoring enhancements lately. (More below the cut…) Continue reading
Professional Development in Toronto- April 7-9, 2008 This year we have over 90 tutorials and breakout sessions including several sessions in Professional Development. Tom Limoncelli, Author, will be presenting “Time Management for System Administrators” and “Help! Everyone Hates Our IT Department (And How To Change That). We also have seminars on Risk Management Fundamentals, Negotiating…
We have a large maintenance this weekend as the electricians cutover power to a several hundred AMP 480V switch panel in preparation for bringing a large 675KW UPS online. Also, at the same time, they lumped in some plumbing work to cutover to the 14″ chilled water mains. So, in order to avoid any sort…
So I wanted to test the blog posting function. And noticed that there is a heading in the left panel for “My Drafts”, so I’m wondering if this will show up immediately, or if I’ll get the option to save it as a draft. Not that you all care, but I thought I would make…
This just in: USENIX is pleased to announce open public access to all its conference proceedings. This significant decision will allow universal access to some of the most important technical research in advanced computing. In making this move USENIX is setting the standard for open access to information, an essential part of its mission. USENIX…
Here is a pair of ssh “for” loops to backup all the crontabs on my Linux and HP-UX systems to my admin host: for f in `cat ~/linux_hostnames.txt ` do echo backing up $f; ssh $f ‘sudo tar cvf – /var/spool/cron/’ > $f.tar done for f in `cat ~/hpux_hostnames.txt ` do echo backing up $f;…
To begin, I’d like to thank all of you that have participated in my research study so far. I appreciate your willingness to share your opinions about the tools you use to do your job. For those of you that have not had the chance to take the survey yet, I encourage you to do…
The syntax is: zip output_archive_name input_file_name Examples: zip new_archive_name existing_file_name will compress existing_file_aname into new_archive_name.zip zip new_archive_name directory_name will create new_archive_name.zip
I’ve been a bash user for several years (8?) but someone just showed me this trick about a year ago, and now I honestly can’t live without it. Control-R at bash prompt will allow you to quickly search your bash history in reverse order. It’s not a full search, you can only type a few…
I wrote this script to insert a timestamp into the pipeline. I call it “teetime” after /usr/bin/tee. It can make vmstat more informative, for example: vmstat 1 | teetime 14Feb2008-18:21:51 procs ———–memory———- —swap– —–io—- –system– —-cpu—- 14Feb2008-18:21:51 r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 14Feb2008-18:21:51 1…