The other day, I read a post on MySysAd blog about people copying blog entries verbatim and passing them off as their own. esofthub added a postfix to his RSS feed to automatically credit the source of the material, which I think is a great solution.
I wasn't too worried about it until I google'd for a random string from one of my blog entries. The results led me to http://www.melonjuice.com/planet, which appears to be an RSS aggregator for technology blogs.
The owner of the site doesn't claim at all to be the author of the material, and I love that my feed is getting aggregated there, but if you look at the site, there aren't any sources listed, except a small link at the bottom with the first name of the author and a link back to the source post.
Like I said, I don't mind, but I have added a 'signature' to my RSS feed which displays the source domain. If it bothers anyone, please drop me a line at standalone.sysadmin@gmail.com and let me know. Otherwise, I'll keep it on. It doesn't seem too intrusive and provides confirmation of the source of the data.
And lest there be any doubt, if you have an aggregator on your site, feel free to aggregate this blog. You're very much welcome to do it, and you don't even have to let me know, though it's neat when I hear from a new site that's doing it :-) Thanks for your support and interest in my material!
Monday, December 1, 2008
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Gift ideas for you and the other sysadmins in your life
I meant to post this on Friday, but I was busy recovering from standing in line for a couple of hours to buy a new TV for $400.
Every Christmas people ask me what I want, and I always give the kneejerk response, "I don't know, nothing?". I usually can't come up with something that I genuinely need or want typically, though there are lots of things I'd be pleasantly surprised by. I'm really not hard to shop for, but I think that people think I am. I'd be happy getting nothing, or even just a card.
Anyway, I set out this year to try to compile a list of things that they can get without worrying whether I will like it. I found some neat stuff online, and thought that you might be interested in the same things I am, so I've compiled a list of stuff, or more like a list of lists. If someone wants to know what to get a geek, just hand them this page.
First, since I just got my brand new HDTV:
I'm a Browncoat and not ashamed of it. I've got the series on DVD and I watch it pretty often. Watching it on Blueray will be pretty sweet, and if that special geek in your life digs SciFi, you can't go wrong with Firefly. (click the box to go to the Fox store)
If there's anyone reading this who isn't familiar with ThinkGeek, you should click the logo and check it out. It's Geek nirvana. Everything is great there, and at one point most of my wardrobe was from their T-shirt section. I was going to give a couple of categories, but really, if it's on that site, there's a good chance your geek will like it.
Sysadmins as a general rule really like to learn. A lot. To that end, here's a link to every product on Amazon with the tag of sysadmin. Lots of great books. If you find yourself getting lots of stuff from Amazon, it's probably cost effective to subscribe to Amazon Prime, so your shipping is free or much cheaper.
Even Wired is getting into the season with this list of Geeky toys that will make you a christmas hero. Some of these are on the expensive side, but anyone who does manage to hack the triceratops gets kudos from me.
I'll end with one of the coolest lists I found: Make's Open Source Hardware 2008. If you're a hardware tinkerer, then this is your list. I'm *not* a hardware hacker, and I want to get some of these. Excellent stuff.
anyway, just some Sunday fluff to fill space. Hope you're having a good weekend.
[UPDATE]
Now with smaller inline image. Sorry!
Every Christmas people ask me what I want, and I always give the kneejerk response, "I don't know, nothing?". I usually can't come up with something that I genuinely need or want typically, though there are lots of things I'd be pleasantly surprised by. I'm really not hard to shop for, but I think that people think I am. I'd be happy getting nothing, or even just a card.
Anyway, I set out this year to try to compile a list of things that they can get without worrying whether I will like it. I found some neat stuff online, and thought that you might be interested in the same things I am, so I've compiled a list of stuff, or more like a list of lists. If someone wants to know what to get a geek, just hand them this page.
First, since I just got my brand new HDTV:
I'm a Browncoat and not ashamed of it. I've got the series on DVD and I watch it pretty often. Watching it on Blueray will be pretty sweet, and if that special geek in your life digs SciFi, you can't go wrong with Firefly. (click the box to go to the Fox store)
If there's anyone reading this who isn't familiar with ThinkGeek, you should click the logo and check it out. It's Geek nirvana. Everything is great there, and at one point most of my wardrobe was from their T-shirt section. I was going to give a couple of categories, but really, if it's on that site, there's a good chance your geek will like it.
Sysadmins as a general rule really like to learn. A lot. To that end, here's a link to every product on Amazon with the tag of sysadmin. Lots of great books. If you find yourself getting lots of stuff from Amazon, it's probably cost effective to subscribe to Amazon Prime, so your shipping is free or much cheaper.
Even Wired is getting into the season with this list of Geeky toys that will make you a christmas hero. Some of these are on the expensive side, but anyone who does manage to hack the triceratops gets kudos from me.
I'll end with one of the coolest lists I found: Make's Open Source Hardware 2008. If you're a hardware tinkerer, then this is your list. I'm *not* a hardware hacker, and I want to get some of these. Excellent stuff.
anyway, just some Sunday fluff to fill space. Hope you're having a good weekend.
[UPDATE]
Now with smaller inline image. Sorry!
Saturday, November 29, 2008
More LVM information
I talked about Logical Volume Manager in my Intro to LVM in Linux.
Tonight I came across an article on backing up LAMP stacks with LVM snapshots.
I knew LVM could do it, but I wasn't aware of the particulars . Justin Ellison's article on it clarifies many off the difficulties with the process. His particular howto is geared towards LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setups, but it is by no means limited to it.
Read through his write up and let me know what you think.
One thing I am interested in seeing is how well it scales. He mentions 500MB of data, which is around 1/600th of the size I'm dealing with. I do have to wonder how quickly I could create a snapshot of that amount of data.
Anyone have more experience with this?
Tonight I came across an article on backing up LAMP stacks with LVM snapshots.
I knew LVM could do it, but I wasn't aware of the particulars . Justin Ellison's article on it clarifies many off the difficulties with the process. His particular howto is geared towards LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setups, but it is by no means limited to it.
Read through his write up and let me know what you think.
One thing I am interested in seeing is how well it scales. He mentions 500MB of data, which is around 1/600th of the size I'm dealing with. I do have to wonder how quickly I could create a snapshot of that amount of data.
Anyone have more experience with this?
Friday, November 28, 2008
Quality Assurance vs Quality Control
Are you good at finding faults in your infrastructure, or are you good at making sure there are no faults. As Jason Cohen relates, Quality Assurance is not Quality Control.
Like many other topics, this is written to programmers, but is a good lesson for sysadmins as well.
Like many other topics, this is written to programmers, but is a good lesson for sysadmins as well.
Doing sysadminy things with Windows PreInstalled Environments
I was, until recently, unfamiliar with the concept of a Windows PreInstalled Environment. For those of us who are primarily Unix based, this is basically like a live CD that boots straight into Windows.
There are a few of these PE CDs available. You can use Microsoft's Preinstallation Environment, or maybe the UBCD4WIN (Ultimate Boot CD for Windows), but the one that seems to get the lion's share of attention is BartPE. There's also REAtoGo, which seems to be a customized BartPE disc. To be completely honest, I haven't used any of these yet, but I'm looking forward to trying it.
Whichever you go with, building the CD seems to be a similar process. You use your own Windows install disc and customize the software through slipstreaming.
Once you've got the disc setup the way you want, it becomes easy to administer your Windows server using it as a known-clean boot. Virus cleansing is risk free, you've got the full gamut of useful Windows recovery tools at your service, and Earnest Oporto used it to update his firmware. What a great idea. How often do you see stuff like that which requires Windows? Sure, there are ways to update that particular firmware without Windows, but for lots of hardware, there isn't. This is a viable solution in that case.
Since I'm woefully unexperienced in this department, I'll appeal to you. Have you ever used a Windows PreInstalled Environment? What types of things do you do with it? Any tips or tricks?
Thanks for sharing!
There are a few of these PE CDs available. You can use Microsoft's Preinstallation Environment, or maybe the UBCD4WIN (Ultimate Boot CD for Windows), but the one that seems to get the lion's share of attention is BartPE. There's also REAtoGo, which seems to be a customized BartPE disc. To be completely honest, I haven't used any of these yet, but I'm looking forward to trying it.
Whichever you go with, building the CD seems to be a similar process. You use your own Windows install disc and customize the software through slipstreaming.
Once you've got the disc setup the way you want, it becomes easy to administer your Windows server using it as a known-clean boot. Virus cleansing is risk free, you've got the full gamut of useful Windows recovery tools at your service, and Earnest Oporto used it to update his firmware. What a great idea. How often do you see stuff like that which requires Windows? Sure, there are ways to update that particular firmware without Windows, but for lots of hardware, there isn't. This is a viable solution in that case.
Since I'm woefully unexperienced in this department, I'll appeal to you. Have you ever used a Windows PreInstalled Environment? What types of things do you do with it? Any tips or tricks?
Thanks for sharing!
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving!
Here in the United States, it's Thanksgiving today, and I've I'm off on holiday to visit my wife's family in Cincinnati.
It's customary to reflect on the things that we're thankful for, so I thought that I'd share some here. Hopefully you've got some things that you're thankful for as well.
I'm thankful for:
My family and friends, even if I don't get to see them all as often as I'd like
My health, while not being the best, is better than a lot of people's
My profession, because I get to learn and grow in it
There are lots of other things that are small in comparison with those, but I really do appreciate the blessings that have allowed me to become who I am and do what I do.
Today, whether you get to spend time with the people important to you or not, reflect on what you're thankful for, and consider those who are less fortunate.
Happy Thanksgiving!
It's customary to reflect on the things that we're thankful for, so I thought that I'd share some here. Hopefully you've got some things that you're thankful for as well.
I'm thankful for:
My family and friends, even if I don't get to see them all as often as I'd like
My health, while not being the best, is better than a lot of people's
My profession, because I get to learn and grow in it
There are lots of other things that are small in comparison with those, but I really do appreciate the blessings that have allowed me to become who I am and do what I do.
Today, whether you get to spend time with the people important to you or not, reflect on what you're thankful for, and consider those who are less fortunate.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
The case of the 500-mile email
This is a great story about someone who had a user who couldn't email anyone over 500 miles away.
This is why being a sysadmin can drive people crazy.
This is why being a sysadmin can drive people crazy.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Infrastructure Switchover
Well, the big event that I've been building to for the past few months is done. All that's left is sweeping up the dust.
Our previous primary/production/main site was in a colocation in central Ohio. It's not a bad facility, but it's geographically non-ideal (the company is recentering in NorthCentral NJ), and the infrastructure there isn't the best. Far better than we can provide, but it can't touch what we've got now.
We relocated to a Tier 3 to a Tier 4 [pdf link] datacenter. The new colocation features world-class infrastructure, from multifactor security to N+2 generators. It's hot.
I am now able to say that I'm not at all worried about the physical plant of the primary site. If there's a problem, we're probably going to cause it ourselves. This is both a relief and a curse ;-)
All I'm doing right now is going around the network making sure that things are running alright after the change. Host keys and things of that nature are all fine, since those were extensively tested prior to the switchover. The things I'm concerned about now are processes which weren't fully tested because they couldn't be, due to the architecture change.
This week is pretty much over Wednesday, thankfully. After that, I'm looking forward to a nice relaxing break where maybe I'll finally get to finish polishing my Simple Talk: Exchange
Our previous primary/production/main site was in a colocation in central Ohio. It's not a bad facility, but it's geographically non-ideal (the company is recentering in NorthCentral NJ), and the infrastructure there isn't the best. Far better than we can provide, but it can't touch what we've got now.
We relocated to a Tier 3 to a Tier 4 [pdf link] datacenter. The new colocation features world-class infrastructure, from multifactor security to N+2 generators. It's hot.
I am now able to say that I'm not at all worried about the physical plant of the primary site. If there's a problem, we're probably going to cause it ourselves. This is both a relief and a curse ;-)
All I'm doing right now is going around the network making sure that things are running alright after the change. Host keys and things of that nature are all fine, since those were extensively tested prior to the switchover. The things I'm concerned about now are processes which weren't fully tested because they couldn't be, due to the architecture change.
This week is pretty much over Wednesday, thankfully. After that, I'm looking forward to a nice relaxing break where maybe I'll finally get to finish polishing my Simple Talk: Exchange
Interesting bug in fresh CentOS install (or why I'm glad I didn't pay for RHEL support on all my servers) from The Life of a Sysadmin
StAardvarktheCarpeted ran into a really interesting bug the other day, and wrote about it. Apparently on his CentOS 5.2 machines, users who were authenticated against an LDAP server couldn't pipe commands.
Right. 'ls' would work, 'grep' would work, but 'ls | grep' wouldn't work. The problem came down to a bug in the distributed nss_ldap software, and as StAardvark alludes to, the bugzilla discussion is well worth reading.
It's sort of interesting to note that the original bug was issued in May of this year, but an actual fixed package wasn't available until the end of July, even though the upstream software was repaired 5 days after the bug was submitted.
Even CentOS (the free version of RHEL) fixed the bug in June, while RedHat support-paying customers didn't get fixed unless they called support for help. The instructions that they were giving out weren't published until a couple of days before the updated package was released.
I've heard that RedHat support wasn't worth buying, but jeez. To actually punish users by making them wait longer for a fix than the free version is pretty bad. I'll stick with CentOS at this point.
Right. 'ls' would work, 'grep' would work, but 'ls | grep' wouldn't work. The problem came down to a bug in the distributed nss_ldap software, and as StAardvark alludes to, the bugzilla discussion is well worth reading.
It's sort of interesting to note that the original bug was issued in May of this year, but an actual fixed package wasn't available until the end of July, even though the upstream software was repaired 5 days after the bug was submitted.
Even CentOS (the free version of RHEL) fixed the bug in June, while RedHat support-paying customers didn't get fixed unless they called support for help. The instructions that they were giving out weren't published until a couple of days before the updated package was released.
I've heard that RedHat support wasn't worth buying, but jeez. To actually punish users by making them wait longer for a fix than the free version is pretty bad. I'll stick with CentOS at this point.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Imagine a beowu...wait, I mean RAID array of these...
So I'm sitting here browsing through Reddit and I find a list of interesting USB devices.
And on that list is this:
60 USB ports with flash drives in them.
My eyes light up! My God! 60 drives....I know 32GB flash drives are getting cheaper...32x60...almost 2TB of raw fast storage...
Of course, bringing me down somewhat was the fact that it costs $8,000...not to mention that it's a duplicator, not a hub. Alas, these dreams...
I still think that if you had critical information that only three or four people were allowed to have access to, it would be neat to setup software raid and encrypt the partition across one device for each person. When you're done accessing the information, everyone gets their drive back, and no one person can look at the data.
And on that list is this:
60 USB ports with flash drives in them.
My eyes light up! My God! 60 drives....I know 32GB flash drives are getting cheaper...32x60...almost 2TB of raw fast storage...
Of course, bringing me down somewhat was the fact that it costs $8,000...not to mention that it's a duplicator, not a hub. Alas, these dreams...
I still think that if you had critical information that only three or four people were allowed to have access to, it would be neat to setup software raid and encrypt the partition across one device for each person. When you're done accessing the information, everyone gets their drive back, and no one person can look at the data.
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