The Call for Participation for LISA '10 has just been published. If you have not attended a LISA conference before, then this would be a great year to start. Even if you don't plan on submitting a paper or a talk proposal, reading the Call for Participation is a great way to understand how the conference works.

There is going to be a new section this year, called "Practice and Experience". It will feature 20 minute talks where people can explain a "substantial system administration project that has been completed." It should be a great way to learn from other people's successes and failures. These talks do not require full papers, but will still be reviewed and chosen by the program committee.

Like probably almost anyone reading this blog, I'm a sysadmin. Specifically, I consider myself to be a pretty darned good one - years of experience, blah blah blah. One of the personality traits a "good sysadmin" has, is the drive and ability to learn new things. COMPLICATED things. No fear. Try out installing and setting up high-availability linux clusters without ever having done it before, try implementing SSL in apache, etc-- you just roll up your sleeves and go. You'll stumble, but you'll LEARN. And you become a rockin' sysadmin in the end because of it.

Lately, I have been wrestling with being able to do that any more. Specifically, the office in which I work has been reclassified as a "service center" of sorts. We have tons of campus customers, and we now charge back for our time. Which means *I* have to charge back for my time. It's a result of the current economic situation, everyone needs to do what they can to survive.

OK, not related to work, but worthy of a blog entry at least.

The other day I dove into VOIP for the first time. I admit, I'm a bit of a holdout with regards to my home phone service. I'm also old enough to recall the days when the phone in our house plugged into the wall with that huge 4-prong plug, and Ma Bell engineer(s) needed to do ANYTHING with regards to phone jacks or phones. If you so much as clipped a wire, out came the Bell-Police :-) Getting to the point of cutting my AT&T service is emotionally difficult. I've ALWAYS had AT&T.

Anyway, I finally decided to switch to VoIP and cut my land line. I'm not there yet, as I'm currently testing out the device first. I opted for an "ooma", which is essentially a product that's "VoIP in a box". You pay for the unit (about $200 US), and that's it. Everything else is free for as long as you own the unit. No monthly charges, no fees, no regulatory charges, nothing. Free local calls, free long distance. And they support porting your land-line number to the device when you're ready ($40 fee).

http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/

Just submitted an article on Cfengine 3 to http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/ - I guess it'll be a few days before it's posted.

Like many of you, I like to have some of the latest technology at my fingertips. Specifically, I'm talking about my workstation. No, while I don't have über-fast sexy hardware, I like to at least have the latest OS flavor(s) installed so I can play with new features.

The other day I decided it was "time" for Fedora 12. Time to play with ext4.

Before I begin, a small word about my prior setup:

disk 1: Windows XP, NTFS partition. Old, crusty, not used anymore, as I have XP in a VM now.
disk 2: Fedora 11, Linux LVM partition. No real data of value, but it does house my XP vm.

I use OpenBSD's packet filter, PF, and am in the middle of building a new router/firewall with a moderately complex ruleset. I generally code rulesets the same way I write shell scripts: adding small bits and testing. My basic ruleset was preventing routing, and the logs kept telling me that the routing packets were being blocked by a rule that I thought shouldn't.

PF has a feature called "antispoof" that builds a set of rules that block packets that claim to originate from interfaces they shouldn't. The rule looks something like:


@16 block drop in log on ! vlan1 inet from 192.0.2.0/24 to any
[ Evaluations: 9907 Packets: 9283 Bytes: 794994 States: 0 ]
[ Inserted: uid 0 pid 2131 ]


I love it. Just when I start getting a little bored..., something comes along that basically makes me go, "WTF?" - and ends up giving me a chuckle in the end. There's stuff that's broken, and then there's stuff that's REALLY broken....

Very recently, we've been tasked with helping migrate key components of an old server that belonged to another department. We're going to migrate the important stuff to a new server of ours,and retire the rest. A lot of this has been my task, but it also involves our DBA and a handful of developers taking a little time on the side to hunt and migrate.

After much tearing out of hair, learned to use dblatex (not passivetex) to generate PDF's from my DocBook XML. Runs faster and smoother - that is to say it actually generates the PDF instead of just spewing out LaTeX errors.