System administrators are busy people, and folks who volunteer for LOPSA tend to be busier than most.

This causes problems when we try to manage projects with volunteer help, because sometimes people get snowed under with more important things. It’s unreasonable for us to expect LOPSA volunteer work to come before work and family commitments. But yet, the projects still need to get handled in a timely manner.

I’ve decided I’m going to start putting a “pong-by” date at the bottom of email requests to volunteers. What that means is, if I don’t get a response by that date, I’m going to assume that the answer is “no” and move onto someone else. No hard feelings—I don’t know whether you’ve fallen into a hole, you thought you’d have time and now don’t, you’re on vacation and not reading email, or what—I’m just going to find someone else.

So if you’ve gotten an email from me and see “Pong by January 1”, now you know what that means. 🙂

Feel free to use this yourself. http://lopsa.org/pong redirects here.

—
Trey Harris is President of LOPSA. His blog entries do not represent the views of LOPSA, its Board, or its membership.
Continue reading

I’ve been thinking recently about what the term “mentoring” means for professional sysadmins. I’ve usually said that I’m “self-taught” in system administration. Most sysadmins I know say the same thing. I say this because I didn’t take any classes on sysadmin, and in the technical aspects, at least, I was self-directed in my first few…

Continue reading

Dear Lazyweb: I’m looking for something like Together (http://reinventedsoftware.com/together/) that runs on Linux. Evidently my Google-Fu is weak this morning because I can’t seem to find anything that comes close. Anyone use something like this? -n

The AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop 2008 announces the 2008 Call For Participation. Come talk to your peers about: * Completed projects * Work in progress * Theories * Best practices * Related research * Updates on previous talks or anything else of note involving AFS and/or Kerberos. The AFS & Kerberos Best Practices…

Continue reading

Catching up on blogs yesterday in the airport, these two posts popped up right after each other in my Google Reader: OpenSolaris: the universal storage platform? http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=876 Which just strikes me as… odd.

If you’re like me, you have similarly named directories—src, bin, images, etc.—strewn all over your filesystem. It’s always irked me that the Mac OS X Finder windows display only the basenames in title bars. You can visually see the containing tree by Command-clicking the basename in the title bar (and, under Leopard, View → Show Path Bar), but I’ve wanted to see it at a glance.

Turns out, it’s easily fixed, with the shell command:

$ defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Then just restart the Finder (since you’re in a shell anyway, killall -HUP Finder will do nicely, or if you’re more visually-oriented, just option-right-click the Finder icon in the Dock and choose Relaunch.

Found on the irreplaceable macosxhints.com.
Continue reading

Someone on the sage-members mailing list asked about checking SSL expiration dates. We use the following script to check them via nagios (actually, we use a slightly older version that takes hostname and port instead of URL, but this is the next version we plan to roll out). I thought I’d post it here (with…

Continue reading

CIO magazine says, System Administrators: what they are, why you need them, and what to look for.

Max Spevack blogged today to remind everyone that with Fedora 8 due out early next week, Fedora Core 6 will be EOL in about a month. If you’re running FC6, now is about the time to think about upgrading.

The premise is believable enough. There are still quite a few vendors out there that still distribute BIOS updates as a floppy image. Heck, they even make it ‘easy’ for you.. The program comes in a self-contained executable that has the image inside it. All you have to do is run the thing and put…

Continue reading