I've been a LOPSA member since 2013, and my new job in Providence, RI has allowed me to pursue starting a Rhode Island chapter of LOPSA. Rhode Island and Southeast Massachusetts are close enough to Boston to make it easy to overlook them but not close enough to make it convenient to attend Boston events….
Dealing with a 7 year old computer hacker Over a recent weekend we had our 7 year old Granddaughter stay over. All of my kids have been around computers since they were old enough to sit at a keyboard (41, 39 & 34). So it stands to reason my Grandchildren would follow suit. My Granddaughter…
Another ramble about the Target issue. A recent article says that there were "thousands" of alerts from a new security product (identified as Fireeye, but claimed to be developed by the CIA, which the commercial product supposedly is not) that was deployed a few months prior to the breach. Each of these alerts was supposedly…
I run a Zimbra mail server at the K-12 school district where I work. Overall I really like the system, but my user base is very susceptible to phishing spam so once a month or so someone will give up their password to a spammer who then proceeds to use our mail server to send…
Any who claim that DOCX is "good enough", right now is not the time to present such claims. I just lost a couple hours fighting translation issues because of the lack of clear documentation of DOCX format so that no tool can write it the same way.
I have been nursing along two FBSD 8.x file servers for several years. A few years ago we de-emphasized commodity servers running FBSD in favor of NetApp filers but they were/are still needed for the labs that use them. Recently, a third lab has decided to replace an old/failing Solaris 10 box with a new…
I’ve finally admitted to myself that I need a single place to archive online all of my conference presentations, workshops, tutorial materials and such, because I've unfortunately been rather scattershot about that in the past. So, now there's adeleshakal.com. I'm looking forward to March and April, because I'll be presenting (remotely) at CrabbyAdmins in Baltimore,…
One of the common jokes about mathematics is that you can easily get four mathematicians in the room and none of them knows anything about what the other studies, even though they agree they are all mathematicians. System administration is rapidly approaching the same point. I have worked with several others in the field who…
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Having now been a Board member for officially six months, I've got to say, it's definitely a strange creature. It's not that the organization is big so much as it's diverse, and spread out, and right now, largely undocumented. That should not be meant to imply that there is no documentation, though. The early founders…