I’ve been thinking a bit about how to foster volunteerism and developing some principles to make it vibrant and healthy. Things like: * Make realistic time committments. Saying that you can commit only 2 hours a week and delivering is better than saying you can commit 8 and delivering 4. In order to effectively divide…
Most people don’t realize the level of management information that you can get from a Netra (104 or 200 or v120). Sure, they are old and slow by modern standards, but they are extremely rugged and come in AC and DC varieties which is very handy when you are a telco shop or have telco…
We just got a (circa 2005) Dell PowerEdge 6850, on which I now want to run (circa 2002) Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1. The Red Hat Hardware Certification matrix shows the 6650 as the only certified 6000-class Dell server. This helps confirm why anaconda ends up giving me the “No valid devices were found on…
How does the old joke go? “Bored with work? Tired of toiling away? Have a meeting!” With most organizations today, we all too often fall prey to unproductive meetings. This leads to wasted time, frustration, and lower morale. This situation is so common, according to my anecdotal findings, that I wanted to find out if…
cat > caller.sh <<_CALLER_ #!/bin/bash echo “weird” | ./reader.sh _CALLER_ cat > reader.sh <<_READER_ : #! /bin/sh read TEST echo “Got >$TEST<” # quote is for ‘cat > reader.sh’ _READER_ chmod 755 caller.sh reader.sh ./caller.sh # prints ‘Got >weird<‘ cat caller.sh | sh # prints ‘Got ><‘ The main issue is, what is that ‘:’…
Cuddletech’s Ben Rockwood gives the super condensed version of the USENIX<->SAGE saga that led to the formation of LOPSA and speaks well of the new organization. I am hoping more press like this gets the word out and increases the number of people interested in making this succeed. It benefits us all if it does.
So, with all the debates, confusion, and flurry of messages flying about, it seems that LOPSA has managed to overcome quite a pile of obstacles and emerge as a real organization doing real things. Granted, most people don’t seem much beyond a fledgling web site and some mailing lists (that still seem quite busy considering…
Frustration, not Necessity, is the mother of Invention. So I’m wont to think of ways I can contribute to that-what-was-once-SAGE and I’m reminded of tal & Christine’s book and the triage/stable/icing approach to operations. For example, triage is “put all your local scripts & software into version control”, stable is “build a software depot”, and…
A site that works completely for https. (done – doug) https and http state to stay the same when following links. (done – doug) A searchable archive of s-m mailing list. (obsolete? – doug) An include the world effort to make sure non-.us sysadms don’t feel excluded. A volunteer coordination committee and volunteer mailing list….
Ever wanted to explain to someone what managing a group of System Administrators is really like? “Benjamin Feen”:http://www.monkeybagel.com does an excellent job of telling us what it is like in his article “Pumas on Hoverbikes”:http://monkeybagel.com/pumas.html bq. […] We’ve all heard the “herding cats” analogy with regard to managing programmers. Managing sysadmins is like leading a…