My First JBOD, Part 2: Irony

After unpacking, racking, and mounting the JBOD, I waited until the weekend had started before powering down the server and installing the RAID card. Connected it all up, rebooted into the Adaptec BIOS, and configured the 6x 1TB drives into a RAID6 array. After that, I installed the RAID StorageManager off of Sun’s website, and […]

My First JBOD: Introduction

This is me setting up a JBOD for use by one or more XEN hosts, using professional hardware. It’s not a hack, not throwing a shitload of drives into a PC with some “prosumer” SATA RAID cards that require you spend weeks fussing with drivers and firmware to get even a minimal write performance out […]

New Books

Latest on the “done” pile are Rule The Freakin’ Markets and IS-IS Network Design Solutions. Summaries/reviews of both are up.

Daemonizing Processes

Update: Commenters have pointed out a few things: This post is incomplete/incorrect. What I’m doing now is having the daemon function call a script that looks like this: #!/bin/bash exec 1>&- exec 2>&- exec 3>&- nohup myPropApp & 2>&1 > thelog.txt That code was from another website who’s URL I lost, and I posted the […]

More Help Wanted

As it turns out I have need for another Systems Administrator, this time in Washington, DC. This job is for a local administrator to handle the day-to-day support and activities in the Washington office (complete with AD domain, Asterisk server, NAS, and a dozen users), as well as the four branch locations in the DC […]

Help Wanted

I’m looking to hire a Linux Administrator in for a position in downtown Chicago. It’s a high-demand, high-stress environment with lots of things going on at any one time: We play with high-end sun servers on an international private network, use Amazon EC2, and have a slew of Asterisk servers forming the joints of a […]

Living with Telcos

Your network engineer orders four T1 lines from locations in City A to a datacenter in City Z via a large telco. He leaves the week before these are to be dropped, and of course, does not document what he was doing or even keep copies of the contracts. Either way, the lines are in […]

The Life of an Admin for Me

Something to say… $ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head 184 svn 165 ls 101 cd 96 ldapsearch 95 ssh 62 vim 25 ping 24 grep 23 sudo 20 rm

Last To The Party

Upgraded my own install of Zimbra to 5.0.4 today, haven’t played with IM yet. Shared documents, a task list, seems cool. BTW, don’t ever, ever, ever modify the LDAP schema in Zimbra. Even via their own “posixAccount” extensions. It’s just bad news all around. Also, I’m enjoying muxtape.

Xen and The Art of Free Speech

Aside from the laughable idea of “militantly” supporting anything with a blog post, Miguel simply noted that these people exist, have written a book, and will be doing the speaking-tour-thing near him. Does he agree with the contents? (shakes eight-ball) Signs point to Yes. Is he free to do so? Also yes. Are you free […]

Pong

I notice I tend to start blog posts like an awkward attempt to jump-start a stalled conversation: “So, I was looking at…” or “So, I was doing X…” It’s a little cowardly on my part, afraid to just jump into something without some sort of warning—in this case, the word “so”. Either that or I […]

Fool Me Once

For anyone who wants to handle dynamic DNS (either in conjunction with DHCPd or not) with Bind and absolutely hates the verbosity of nsupdate, here’s a shell script which handles the common-cases of adding and removing: Forward/reverse entries CNAMEs The command line arguments are -k (privkey) -a (action) -h (hostname) -i (ipaddr) -c (cname) -d […]

The Fool's Only Teacher 3

Sometimes life works. Other times it doesn’t. Hopefully you get to the point where you can spot the “doesn’t” parts in advance… If you’re lucky enough to get a technical person calling you in for the interview, remember to ask about a dress-code range. It’s uncomfortable to be pimping a suit when the guy who […]

The Fool's Only Teacher II

Hopefully, this can be turned into a running gag series. SBS Server 2003 Standard Edition sucks. Either get Premium or just eschew SBS altogether. I’ll take a wiki over SharePoint anyday. Supposedly, Kerberos authentication between an Apache virtual host and an ActiveDirectory domain is impossible. However, mod_auth_pam and pam_krb5 are not only easier to setup, […]

The Fool's Only Teacher

When writing NUnit test suites for C#, make sure the TestFixture classes are explicitly declared “public” (this is because classes are declared “internal” by default—and is really only an issue in VS2005 because it no longer adds the “public” when you create a class via “Add Item”). The Quickbooks 2006 DB service does not like […]