In the Fall a young sysadmin's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of LISA. (apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson) It's that time of year again, the time when a thousand-plus sysadmins make the trek to wherever the annual LISA conference is being held. This year, it is being held in Seattle, and most of the LOPSA Board…
Well, I guess its time I continue with these posts. I had originally intended a big coming out by putting blog posts and such in various places back on September 25th (International Ataxia Awareness Day), but Shellshock ate up my free time…. So, I had made a new year's resolution this year to…
Well this is twice in a year that I get to do an emergency patch to all my machines – Ugh! The bash vulnerability is a major one because it can affect any program that uses bash to set environment variables such as dhclient, cgi-scripts, etc. To test if you have the problem run: env…
Work upgraded me to a new Thinkpad T440p which has the new clickpad with a single physical button in the clickpad instead of the three separate buttons on the older T410 that I was using. So how do I get the one clickpad button to act like a three button mouse. After a bit of…
Only a few hours ago, the LOPSA Board adjourned their annual face-to-face meeting. The LOPSA bylaws state that we must hold our annual directors meeting within 90 days of the elections, and this is where the newly elected board members take their seats. Since this is typically the only time in the year that the…
I’m on my way to my second LOPSA Board of Directors Face to Face meeting. The last time I was here, it was when I became a member of the board, and I really felt like a lot of my time at the meeting was spent trying to understand why LOPSA is the way that…
Last night, I was lucky enough to be able to speak at LOPSA Rhode Island, a proto-LOPSA chapter that Adam Codega has been starting. It was a really good time. Adam's employer, Swipely has a headquarters that instantly makes you feel like you're a couple thousand miles to the west, in Silicon Valley. Not only…
I sent this to the LOPSA-Discuss mailing list, and I thought that it might be nice to put up on my blog here at lopsa.org, too Your guide to throwing a great SysAdmin Appreciation Day party Hello! My name is Matt Simmons, and I like to throw parties. Any occasion, really, but SysAdmin Appreciation…
I work for a K-12 school district and we use Google Apps for EDU which is built on top of Google Apps for Business. We have tied this into our local authentication systems so when a staff or student changes their password locally it also changes their password on Google Apps. It worked pretty well…
You don't have to even have a computer to have your data compromised. AT&T stored SSN data in customer record data. This was exposed by the news article stating that AT&T Mobility (the cellular phone branch) had customer data, including SSN and CPNI exposed when three employees of a vendor with access to the records…