My very wonderful wife just got me the coolest present. !http://www.rushbackstage.com/store/assets/images/products/rush/Accessories/RU00002012L.jpg! Totally awesome out of the blue gift. I’ve been a huge Rush fan for years, and this is going to have a place of honor on my office wall. Each month has historically “significant” events listed on some of the days, such as January…
Here’s an “article”:http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9032818&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1 from ComputerWorld/IDG, talking about what SAs are, and how companies should look for them. Not a very good article, as it undersells our value. Maybe someone can right a response to the author and get a better article published.
Earlier this week, after the US Courts ruled that Novell owned the copyrights to Unix, Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry — trying to reassure the Linux community about Novell’s good intentions — proclaimed that Novell is “not even in the Unix business any more.”
If they’re not in the business, then that means the copyrights are essentially worthless to them. There are however at least three big players still in the Unix business: Sun, IBM, and HP. There’s several smaller players in the business, but really no one else worth mentioning.
I just sat in on the teleconference with Sun and IBM announcing that IBM will become the first tier one vendor to resell Solaris on X86. Although HP has supported running Solaris on their Proliant line for several years, they have never had a reseller agreement or any kind of cooperative engineering agreement with Sun….
Read an interesting discussion on the lkml list where Linus and friends talked about atime’s performance impacts (http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148). Ingo phrased the problem best with: ‘ For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a … write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from…
Say you want to strace a script.. Well, you can’t, right? Because strace expects ELF (or other object format) executables as a target, or a running process. So one trick is to put a sleep at the top of the process, start it, do a quick ps, then strace -p.. Ugly, but effective in many…
The single most important piece of information processed by top is the
measure of a process’s percentage cpu utilization, known as percent
cpu. Although top is perfectly capable of display and sorting on a
variety of information, by default it sorts by percent cpu. The
reason for this is that most people use top to find out what the cpu
is doing, or more specifically which process is hogging the cpu.
Percent cpu readily reveals this information.
In working on some promo material for Sysadmin Days we started looking at Jesse’s Disaster Recovery class. Over the weekend a total hardware loss at Designwyse came up on #LOPSA. See some pictures showing complete destruction. It occurs to me that it would be handy for LOPSA and System Administrators to have some pictures of…
Happy “Sysadmin Appreciation Day”:http://www.sysadminday.com/ Great gifts for sysadmins include “LOPSA”:http://lopsa.org/ memberships and registrations to “LOPSA Sysadmin Days – Philidelphia”:http://lopsa.org/SysadminDays/ Check it out, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems has posted a “blog”:http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/thank_you entry about Sysadmin Appreciation Day! Thanks, Jonathan, for helping us get the word out about our profession!
NTP 4 introduces some interesting new things that few people seem to know about, are sparsely documented, and are difficult to setup correctly, however they can help with synchronization in the event of total external network failure (even if you don’t have a reference time source). Now, some reference time sources aren’t expensive (others are),…