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hcoyote's blogAuditorsSubmitted by hcoyote on Wed, 2008-07-09 10:08.
Someone on #lopsa recently asked what he should tell an auditor who wants the root account completely disabled on a Unix system. The analogy I could come up with is: Disabling root would be akin to cutting the master key to a building in half and making parts of the building unusable at certain times. You wouldn't be able to access things in emergencies to fix them, for example. What other ways would you use to describe this? 5 comments | 1118 reads
Out of Band Management slidesSubmitted by hcoyote on Sat, 2008-07-05 12:39.
In June, I gave a presentation to LOPSA Austin of various out of band management technologies that I've experienced and used in my day to day work. As promised, here are the slides if anyone else is interested. This a high-level overview of IPMI, ILO, ILOM, and some third party addons and management tools. -edit- add new comment | 4547 reads | 1 attachment
ZFS configurations on Sun x4500Submitted by hcoyote on Mon, 2008-06-30 09:14.
Example ZFS configurations for a Sun x4500 with 24TB of raw disk. Two disks are held for OS, leaving 46 available disks for ZFS. One 45 disk raidz2 zvol across 6 controllers.Most disk, but very slow performance. ~21TB space.
add new comment | 6526 reads
Notes from the Austin Sun User Group June meeting: Virtualization and SolarisSubmitted by hcoyote on Thu, 2007-06-21 23:13.
Register for the website! http://www.austinsug.org/Members.html If you want to be part of the leadership board, contact Jeff. Jeff.blanchard at sun.com. Thanks to Sigma Solutions for providing the food and drink. Next meeting: August 15, 2007. Solaris 10 Dtrace by Jarod Jenson, chief architect at Aeysis. Jarod is the resource Sun brings into companies who need dtrace help. Very likely a hands on meeting. This meeting is about the different Virtualization technologies in Solaris and developed on Sun Sparc hardware. The presentation was given by Scott Gaspard at sun.com. Years ago, in the land of dinosaurs, everyone stuck everything on a few large systems. Later, people used cheap hardware based on x86 systems and replaced the big iron. The problem is, people couldn’t scale the apps beyond the confines of the box, so it ended up with server sprawl where you had dozens of vendors, no real remote management, operating systems all over the place and lots of hardware that was provisioned to run for a certain type of load that may have not fully utilized the resources on that system. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that you could stick multiple operating systems and applications on a single piece of physical hardware and you ended up increasing the utilization of the underlying hardware. This translated to lower cost because you needed fewer resources to run the system (cooling, power, people). add new comment | 41942 reads
Testing notificationsSubmitted by hcoyote on Sun, 2007-03-04 08:16.
I've been receiving double notifications for things posted to the website. Trying to see where it's occuring. add new comment | 945 reads
Austin Solaris User Group -- first meetup reportSubmitted by hcoyote on Wed, 2007-02-28 22:57.
Last night Sun held it's first Austin Solaris User Group meeting at Painter The meeting was broken up into two parts: a presentation about new features The presentation was a whirlwind tour of things like zones and their add new comment | 14485 reads
Datacenters in a BoxSubmitted by hcoyote on Fri, 2007-02-09 18:35.
Recently, Sun announced an initiative called Project Blackbox. If you haven't heard of it, it's something they call a "virtual data center". But, it's real and physical. You can touch it, hear it, move it, and ... as the Sun guy said, taste it if you like. (Personally, I wouldn't, I don't know where that datacenter has been). Blackbox is a shippable mini data center. They take a 20 foot steel shipping container, stuff eight racks into it with hookups for 3-phase power, networking, and water pipes. You can use up to seven of those racks for computing equipment for a total of 250 standard rack U of space (just think, that's up to 1000 Opteron cores in that footprint). The eighth rack is retained for networking and miscellaneous environmental equipment (monitoring and dehumidification it seems). add new comment | 6416 reads
LOPSA at LISA2006Submitted by hcoyote on Tue, 2007-01-16 14:08.
Some photos I took of LOPSA at LISA2006. add new comment | 1049 reads
LISA 2006 trip reportSubmitted by hcoyote on Mon, 2007-01-15 21:15.
Whee. I'm finally done with my trip report for work. It probably still needs polishing. I'm done though. I can't bring myself to write anything else about it. It's viewable at Travis Campbell's LISA 2006 Trip Report. All my notes are also published on Google Docs. If anyone's interested, I'll post direct links to them, or just provide pdfs somewhere. Google doesn't make it easy to gather all the urls of published docs right now. :-/ add new comment | 1221 reads
Lights Out ManagementSubmitted by hcoyote on Thu, 2006-11-09 09:35.
Or how I conquered out-of-band management with a box of serial and a power button.In the beginningWhen dinosaurs ruled the earth and small, mammalian critters scurried through the data center, the classic method of doing out-of-band management was via a crash cart and the laying of holy hands upon the ailing system. You'd wheel that old, cranky monitor around while the wheels going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa across the raised floor. You'd crawl back behind your computer shelves with a 25 foot vga and ps/2 cable, plug in, tune out, and administer. Maybe you were lucky and had in-rack KVM access. Whatever it was, it still required a physical presence in the room, often at 2AM when you were 30 miles away at a rocking party. add new comment | 12339 reads
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