nhruby's blog

moving blog; AH/USENIX/LOPSA suit thoughts

nhruby — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 07:18:20 -0700

The LOPSA blog is nice but I sometimes get frustrated by the editing tools Drupal provides. I also sometimes want to blog about non-system-administration related things and don't think this is a great place for that kind of content. As such, I'm going to start using Blogger instead. My new blog can be found at: http://mindlessadmin.blogspot.com/

For system administration related posts I'll probably post a link here as well in case someone might be interested. For instance, I've posted

Why monitor?

nhruby — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:04:29 -0700

I read the following blog post about automated testing in software projects which made me think about how "monitoring" is the system administration equivalent. I've never thought about this analogy before, but I think it's valid and I might try floating it at work, seeing as we've been doing some monitoring enhancements lately. (More below the cut...)

simple helpful stuff: reverse search in bash

nhruby — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:35:09 -0800

I've been a bash user for several years (8?) but someone just showed me this trick about a year ago, and now I honestly can't live without it. Control-R at bash prompt will allow you to quickly search your bash history in reverse order. It's not a full search, you can only type a few characters, but it's super handy for finding some oddball thing you did yesterday, or something that you do frequently but haven't aliased/automated yet.

Things that rock: PXE Booting Acronis

nhruby — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:50:57 -0800

I'm doing some work on fixing up our build and provisioning environment, and found the following blog post for booting Acronis via PXE:
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/network-administrator/pxe-aka-pre-execution-environment-and-acronis-part-2/

I ended up using the kernel and ramdisk from the Acronis Universal Restore CD which seemed to work just fine. Sadly, my wifi at home is acting just funky enough that testing a restore is pretty darn painful. I'll give it a whirl Monday.

This is a fairly minor thing, but I never end up never having an Acronis CD (or blank cd to make one) when I need it. Or I'm hundred of miles away from the server I want to run Acronis on and can't put the CD in the drive. This makes Acronis a quick "F12" away no matter what (assuming I have a KVM, of course :)

Dear Lazyweb: Document / Information Management software for Linux?

nhruby — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 08:40:17 -0800

Dear Lazyweb:

I'm looking for something like Together (http://reinventedsoftware.com/together/) that runs on Linux. Evidently my Google-Fu is weak this morning because I can't seem to find anything that comes close.

Anyone use something like this?

-n

Sun Who?

nhruby — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 09:45:52 -0800

Catching up on blogs yesterday in the airport, these two posts popped up right after each other in my Google Reader:

http://storagemojo.com/2007/11/29/opensolaris-the-universal-storage-platform/

http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=876

Which just strikes me as... odd.

Fedora Core 6 EOL in December

nhruby — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:36:41 -0700

Max Spevack blogged today to remind everyone that with Fedora 8 due out early next week, Fedora Core 6 will be EOL in about a month.

If you're running FC6, now is about the time to think about upgrading.

Things to remember

nhruby — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:38:20 -0700

Things one must remember when dealing with Dell firmware updates...

Keeping your INBOX empty

nhruby — Sat, 19 May 2007 09:13:34 -0700

I've been busy lately, so I've been catching up on my RSS feeds in Google Reader on Saturday mornings while having coffee. This morning I read a post from 37signals that, among other things, mentioned keeping your email INBOX as empty as possible. I've seen lots of other people mention this and I can't understand why this is such a big deal. I guess it's a personal preference. A "less is more" stance to email management.

To me, "more is more" when it comes to my INBOX ...

Hosting personal web pages without the tilde

nhruby — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 12:20:59 -0700

This week one of the things I dealt with was the elimination of the tilde ("~") from URL's as part of the migration process to our new personal web hosting service. Searching around, I found that there's not a lot of information about how to do this, though all the tools are there if you know where to look. In an attempt to save others some time, here's what I did...