So, it’s SysAdmin Day today, so I want to thank everyone who manages a Unix, Windows, mainframe, or network based system, whether for desktop or server use. Don’t forget to nominate your favorite SA for SysAdmin of the Year! Thank your fellow SAs, too!
Shiiiiiiiiiiny. It’s a physically attractive server, and while this feature may not add any 9s to your uptime percentage, it will certainly attracted oohs and ahhs at the datacenter. Beauty isn’t just skin-deep with this server. Crack open the top (which you do by pushing down on a spring-loaded tab, then pulling up on it)…
So, from today’s Lopsa Live discussion, I realized that I (and maybe many others) usually consider publishing or posting to http://lopsa.org difficult because it has to be a longer or at least more formal article. I usually think of this site as something requiring some sage advice or carefully editing content before publishing. This isn’t…
IBM’s latest ServeRAID drivers (v 7.0) work with RHEL 3. The only problem is, their ServeRAID 7 manager has changed how ServeRAID sends SNMP traps. ServeRAID 6.1 would let you set up SNMP traps from the Raid Agent. ServeRAID 7 requires that you set up “agentx” for Net-SNMP, so that their daemon “aus-snmpd” can run…
I was speaking with an (older) acquiantance last night and he was complaining about people who get in their car and immediately get on their cell phone (or “mobile”, for most of those outside the US). Which reminded me of how lazy and spoiled we’ve gotten. Do you remember when we had corded phones in…
This week one of the things I dealt with was the elimination of the tilde (“~”) from URL’s as part of the migration process to our new personal web hosting service. Searching around, I found that there’s not a lot of information about how to do this, though all the tools are there if you know where to look. In an attempt to save others some time, here’s what I did…
The idea of “mentoring” has always been a hot topic in the system administration community. This is reflected in the roots of the SAGE name, recognizing that the commmunity was (at that time) more like a Guild than a rigidly-defined and codified academic discipline. SAGE tried to create mentoring programs several times, but they never really took off, yet there were always people willing to take up the gauntlet again and again. At the first planning meeting for LOPSA (August 2005), we spent a lot of time talking about community and we seemed to all agree that mentoring was one of the most important parts of the community we were planning to serve. This topic was again raised at the LOPSA Community Meeting at LISA (December 2005) as one that our members felt strongly about. When we ask our members about what should be our highest priority services, a “mentoring program” always ranks near the top of the list.
We as a community seem to want a mentoring program, but before we begin again, shouldn’t we ask ourselves, ”’Why have sysadmin mentoring programs been less than stellar successes?”’
Continue reading
There was some discussion on #lopsa about doing backups of mysql using mysqldump and having to deal with extracting tables from large dump files. This is what I came up with. It’s worked well enough for extracting full tables from a RHEL4U1 mysql dump. #!/usr/bin/perl -wn # # extract a specific table from a mysql4.X…
I stumbled upon Gliffy.com, a web-based Visio clone today, and was quite impressed. The good: – 100% web based – Good layout – Intuitive user interface – Worked in Firefox 1.5.0.4 under OSX 10.4.7 without crashing once. Very few flash-based applets seem to be able to make that claim! – Has all of the basic…
I work for a dotcom that didn’t go dotboom. We’re trying to hire a sysadmin and we’re offering 75th percentile rates (or higher) for the “right person.” Despite an aggressive interview schedule, good perks, a great company to work for, it’s been next to impossible to find anyone. We’ve made a few offers and been…