Well, I finally joined lopsa. I’ve been slack in actually doing it but I think the organization is well worth it. Not sure how much I’ll blog here… I have an existing blog at http://www.sysadminblog.com I also have a Planet aggregation of general sysadmin feeds and related topics. Suggestions for feeds to add are welcome!…
By now, I’m sure everyone with a Sun system has heard about the widely disseminated vulnerability in Solaris 10’s telnetd code. My experiences in managing that issue from early announcement to patch might serve as a warning/aide to others who are looking at security models. Several lessons were learned as a result of the experience….
I’ve been reading the long thread kicked off by Luke Kanies’s email about the state of system administration as illustrated by the current tools. A minor subthread touched on why there aren’t more books about system administration theory, what that theory is, and so forth. A couple of mathematical topics were briefly mentioned, and it…
Recently, Sun announced an initiative called Project Blackbox. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s something they call a “virtual data center”. But, it’s real and physical. You can touch it, hear it, move it, and … as the Sun guy said, taste it if you like. (Personally, I wouldn’t, I don’t know where that…
Anthony Spina writes an interesting article on the Splunk blog ([here|http://splunkideas.blogspot.com/2007/02/youve-tagged-your-it-now-tag-your-ip.html]). Using network databases like this can make distributed operations much easier. How do you tag your machines?
Luke Kanies blogs a [rant|http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/02/why_isnt_system_administration.html] on configuration management that claims that the entire state of system administration is broken. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong. The problem is, he describes a microcosm of system administration in configuration management and then goes on to conclude that all tools of all aspects of system administration suck and…
So, all of the sudden “automation” is popular again. Luke Kanies posted a “blog”:http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/02/ on O’Reilly and sparked a discussion on “lopsa-discuss”:http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss. My first response got fairly long and I ran out of time for that mail message. So, I decided to move the rest to a blog post. In the intervening time, I’ve actually…
I’m working on a talk about the big lies in our field. What is your favorite “truism” in SA that just isn’t true? I’m looking for things like “adding just one more won’t hurt”, not so much the “I’ll be right over” kind. What’s your nominee?
For anyone job hunting, the positions on my team are filled for now. We may be looking for more system administrators later this year, so keep your eyes peeled. Other updates on my own blog site.
Some photos I took of LOPSA at LISA2006.