League of Professional System Administrators blogs

Ohio LinuxFest 2008: Free and Open Source Software Conference and Expo

mlotspaih — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:04:02 -0700

Ohio LinuxFest 2008
Free and Open Source Software Conference and Expo
Columbus, Ohio | October 11, 2008

About the Ohio LinuxFest
The fifth annual Ohio LinuxFest will be held on October 11, 2008 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Hosting authoritative speakers and a large expo, the Ohio LinuxFest welcomes Free and Open Source Software professionals, enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to take part in the event. The Ohio LinuxFest is a free, grassroots conference for the Linux/Open Source Software/Free Software community that started in 2003 as a large inter-LUG meeting and has grown steadily since. It is a place for the community to gather and share information about Linux and Open Source Software. A large expo area adjacent to the conference rooms will feature exhibits from our sponsors as well as a large .org section from non-profit Open Source/Free Software projects.

LinuxFest 2008 Recap.

mhalligan — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:04:34 -0700

Last weekend we went to LinuxFest NorthWest 2008 in Bellingham, WA. It was a great time, we handed out a bunch of Tee-Shirts, met a lot of good people, and saw some interesting presentations. I even spoke with around half a dozen potential summer interns.

Jung Shin Tong Il

spp — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:52:56 -0700

Late last year, I started to take Tae Kwon Do lessons. It started out because my son was interested, and I wanted to encourage him. I found out that there is a veritable Tae Kwon Do legend living in the Columbus area and teaching just a few miles from my house. Sr. Grandmaster (9th Dan) Joon Pyo Choi is a veteran Olympic Coach, recipient of the 2007 US Tae Kwon Do Grandmasters Society Coach of the Year, past multi-year Korean National Champion (equivalent of current World Champion ranking), and founder of the International Oriental Martial Arts College.

The experience of training under GM Choi has been amazing. His philosophy encompasses not just TKD but holistic life experience, including the Kimoodo Healing Arts and the Moogong Ryu (Way of the Peaceful Warrior) style that he developed.

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...)

Professional Development in Toronto- April 7-9, 2008

Bruce Cole — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:04:36 -0700

Professional Development in Toronto- April 7-9, 2008

This year we have over 90 tutorials and breakout sessions including several sessions in Professional Development. Tom Limoncelli, Author, will be presenting "Time Management for System Administrators" and "Help! Everyone Hates Our IT Department (And How To Change That). We also have seminars on Risk Management Fundamentals, Negotiating for IT Products, IT Best Practice Standards and over 80 more sessions, keynotes and presentations.
Visit http://www.it360.ca/2008/conf_glance_day.cfm for all the details.
Two free keynotes are of particular interest by David Rice, Author of "Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software" and Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director Google Inc.

musings on a maint

doug — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:28:16 -0700

We have a large maintenance this weekend as the electricians cutover power to a several hundred AMP 480V switch panel in preparation for bringing a large 675KW UPS online. Also, at the same time, they lumped in some plumbing work to cutover to the 14" chilled water mains. So, in order to avoid any sort of inrush issues, we're shutting down the 588 machines in the cluster.

The current measurement units on the Starline 400A buses still read between 20A and 28A after shutdown, which means that this power is divided among 50 24 port Voltaire switches, 2 288 port Voltaire switches, 20 HP 10/100 ProCurve 2600 series switches, 22 Force 10 S50N switches, and 2 Force 10 S2410 switches, as well as whatever inefficiency exists in powering 30 Servertech 60A CDUs, 4 30A 0U PDUS, 10 30A 2U PDUs (all of which have monitoring hardware on board), and a Cyclades ACS 48 port console server. That's a fair bit more current than I would have intuited, and a fair percentage of a medium loaded cluster consuming about 160 A per phase at 208V (3 phase).

Testing the blog

roman — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:46:50 -0700

So I wanted to test the blog posting function. And noticed that there is a heading in the left panel for "My Drafts", so I'm wondering if this will show up immediately, or if I'll get the option to save it as a draft.

Not that you all care, but I thought I would make the test message a little more interesting than "testing..."

A small note to the powers that be, for a lil' ol' simple *nix guy like me, a help link explaining the above would be great. And if that information exists already, uhm, where?

My next post will have some actual substance, I swear. Not that you all will care then either , but nonetheless.

Allow me to encourage you to join the very cool USENIX Association

Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:52:28 -0700

This just in:

USENIX is pleased to announce open public access to all its conference
proceedings.

This significant decision will allow universal access to some of the
most important technical research in advanced computing. In making this
move USENIX is setting the standard for open access to information, an
essential part of its mission.

USENIX could not achieve such goals without the support and dedication
of its membership. We urge you to encourage others to join USENIX.
Membership helps us present over 20 influential conferences each year
and offer open access to the technical information presented there.

backing up crontabs over ssh (many-to-one disk-to-disk backup)

Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:02:57 -0800

Here is a pair of ssh "for" loops to backup all the crontabs on my Linux and HP-UX systems to my admin host:

for f in `cat ~/linux_hostnames.txt `
do
echo backing up $f; ssh $f 'sudo tar cvf - /var/spool/cron/' > $f.tar
done

for f in `cat ~/hpux_hostnames.txt `
do
echo backing up $f; ssh $f 'sudo tar cvf - /var/spool/cron/crontabs' > $f.tar
done

Let me know if this is useful to you.

Best,
Aleksey

Friendly reminder: Take a survey and win an iPod Nano

nicolefv — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:10:45 -0800

To begin, I'd like to thank all of you that have participated in my research study so far. I appreciate your willingness to share your opinions about the tools you use to do your job.

For those of you that have not had the chance to take the survey yet, I encourage you to do so. I need 40-50 more responses before I can conduct my analysis and will stop collecting responses once I have gathered ~150, so your chances of winning the iPod Nano have increased.

A description of my study and the survey can be found in my earlier post here: http://lopsa.org/blog/2819. You can access the survey here: http://www.questionbuilder.com/console/TakeSurvey?id=38817

How to use zip to compress files

Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:22:44 -0800

The syntax is:

zip output_archive_name input_file_name

Examples:

zip new_archive_name existing_file_name

will compress existing_file_aname into new_archive_name.zip

zip new_archive_name directory_name

will create new_archive_name.zip

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.

useful little perl script to insert timestamps into your data stream / pipeline

Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:21:07 -0800

I wrote this script to insert a timestamp into the pipeline. I call it "teetime" after /usr/bin/tee.

It can make vmstat more informative, for example:

vmstat 1 | teetime

14Feb2008-18:21:51 procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu---- 14Feb2008-18:21:51 r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 14Feb2008-18:21:51 1 0 160 15796 41996 255964 0 0 0 0 1035 88 0 0 100 0 14Feb2008-18:21:52 0 0 160 15796 41996 255964 0 0 0 208 1049 99 0 0 99 0



Endorsements of Aleksey Tsalolikhin from his colleagues
Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:06:02 -0800
To start the day off on a positive note, I decided to post my LinkedIn endorsements on my web site.
Here are a few:
"It was always a pleasure working with Aleksey at Earthlink. His dedication to projects, technical knowledge, and interpersonal skills are only a few of his many attributes." (December 25, 2005)

– Jason Wells, worked with Aleksey at EarthLink
"Aleksey has a natural ability to care and help his peers with seemingly complex problems. His can-do attitude is extremely refreshing in high stress situations." (August 4, 2005)

– Alonso Robles, worked with Aleksey at EarthLink




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 :)