Posts Categorized: SysAdmin
Welcome to week 2 of Blogrotate. It was a short week due to Thanksgiving (Canada) and Columbus Day (US), but the world of IT is always buzzing. So as they say at the race track, pitter-patter, let’s get at er.
Recently, hanekomu was contemplating how to make subsequent installs of a Task::BeLike module upgrade its dependencies to their latest version. This gave me ideas…
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Blogrotate. This blog is weekly filter of some of the most interesting news items as it applies to system administrators. We’ll be tackling such topics as operating systems, hardware, software and utilities and even some humorous items. The SA team here at Pythian all love of crawling through RSS feeds and tech blogs, and we’ll bring the best to you every week.
I just installed a copy of the titular distro last night and have been playing with it a bit. So far it’s been less trouble than I would have expected from a first beta, and runs well. Get Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala beta 1 here. A word to the wise, this is beta software and not yet ready for prime time.
I use Mozilla Thunderbird at work for reading my email and, since Mozilla Messaging is approaching the release of Thunderbird 3, I decided to give the latest beta a try. I’m an Ubuntu user (8.04 “Hardy Heron” on my workstation) so I sought out a PPA for development versions of Thunderbird, and came across ubuntu-mozilla-daily. I added the repository to my apt config and you can too, here’s how:
I tested OracleVM (OVM) templates on their own distribution of Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5 with seeded VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.2 for X. All went fine, but the VNC connection to virtual machine was not painless as I expected.
Most people think Windows administrators make a living with their right-hand—you know, right-clicking and left-clicking the user interface to get things done. I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing VBScript scripts to administer Windows servers and workstations and automating repetitive tasks. One reason for me moving into Windows PowerShell is its roots in the Microsoft .NET Framework, as I have done a fair amount of .NET programming. But what is Windows PowerShell anyway?
My old friend and collaborator Theo Schlossnagle at OmniTI posted his slides from his Scalable Internet Architectures talk at VelocityConf 2009. The slides are brilliant even without seeing Theo talk and I highly recommend the time it takes to flip through them, for anyone who is interested in systems performance. If anyone took an mp3 of this talk I’m dying to hear it, please let me know. Here’s the slide deck. Let me know your thoughts.
Connecting to a cisco vpn device with vpnc on jaunty. If you use vpnc and vpnc-disconnect to bring the connection up and down, all works fine. If you leave the connection idle too long and are disconnected from the other end, the resolv.conf is not always updated. This is a problem because, when you do a DNS lookup in a browser you’ll experience delays, the DNS servers from your vpn connection are no longer available. The easiest way to check this is to login to your vpn and check the contents of /etc/resolv.conf.
This post might seem outside of our focus, but life brings all kinds of challenges. A friend of mine bought a MacBook when she was on vacation in the USA. Her Mac completely broke down. The service guys told her she’d need to replace the motherboard, which would cost almost the same as a new computer. The problem was her Mac wouldn’t even start, and all the data she had on a hard-drive was stuck in the neat white box without any signs of life. Sure, I said, I’m a computer guy I can recover it, can’t I?
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