I saw on one of the news sites (Slashdot or OSNews, forget which exactly) a story about the following 10 Essential Rules for System Administrators. These are mostly pretty basic and many of them are not really SA specific. I'm not certain that "backup regularly" and "test your backups regularly" are deserving of being two separate rules; I consider that testing backups is part of the overall backup process.

One thing I thought was kind of interesting was the timing of this coming out with the number one rule being "Keep it Simple" and my first Black Belt System Administration topic "A punch is just a punch", which is not specifically about system design but about sticking with the basics.

The darcs revision control system has all but lost out to git within the past few months. A rather large part of the reason is a rushed and very poorly worded release announcement, following a rather long (I'm told 4 years; I haven't been aware of it that long, which itself is perhaps ominous) post-1.0 silence from the darcs developers:

Even people who are familiar with internal politics may not realize the extent to which technical decision-making can be a distant second, or worse, to political concerns. An extreme case is real politics:

It is trivial to set things up so you are able to select memtest86 as a boot option in GRUB:

Download the latest memtest source from http://www.memtest86.com.

Extract and follow the instructions in the README that comes with it to compile. Copy the resulting memtest.bin to /boot and edit /etc/grub.conf to have the following 3 lines:

title Memtest86
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/memtest.bin

Make sure you reboot to test.

In theory this should work with any x86 OS + bootloader. I am doing this with RHEL 4 + GRUB.

I've recently had a number of projects at work that want to mix multiple volume managers on a single server, specifically ZFS and VxVM for SAN volumes (actually, three including SVM for internal boot disk mirroring). The projects generally are for database servers, and want to use VxVM for database volumes because ZFS currently has some serious limitation on database size (limited number of devices recommended in a single zpool) and performance (single threaded checksumming, for one). However, at the same time, they want to have access to some of ZFS's features (in particular, the ability to oversubscribe filesystems, dynamic resize, snapshots and rollback) for some of the other filesystems.

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.

Picked up this tid-bit on how to disable IPv6 (which aligns with the general sys admin philosophy of "if we are not using it, remove it or turn it off to simplify the system and increase security":

(1) Edit /etc/sysconfig/network and set NETWORKING_IPV6=no.

(2) Issue the following command as root: 'chkconfig ip6tables off'.

(3) Reboot the host machine.

Something—I'm honestly not sure what—has changed in Mac OS X Leopard in a subtle way that has totally derailed my workflow for making presentations involving code samples.

I give a lot of Keynote talks that are very heavy on code samples. For years, I've had a workflow for creating code-sample slides that's worked pretty well for me:

First, I create a directory for the slide show. Inside is my Keynote presentation, and subdirectories for ancillary materials. The relevant ones here are code-samples/ and images/.

In the code-samples/ directory, I create little files containing the code fragments. I edit them in Aquamacs Emacs (a very nice Aqua GUI for GNU Emacs) which gives me code syntax highlighting:

I've been thinking recently about what the term "mentoring" means for professional sysadmins.

I've usually said that I'm "self-taught" in system administration. Most sysadmins I know say the same thing. I say this because I didn't take any classes on sysadmin, and in the technical aspects, at least, I was self-directed in my first few system administration jobs. My supervisors and coworkers may have given me hints or things to look at, but I didn't have the opportunity to watch them work directly.

But I'm not really "self-taught", certainly not in the way that a musician might be "self-taught" or a cook might be "self-taught". You can imagine someone teaching themselves to play the piano, for instance, by sitting down at the keyboard and pressing different keys in various ways and observing how the piano sounds, or someone trying cooking ingredients in different ways and tasting the results. But can you imagine someone sitting down at a Unix prompt and typing random keystrokes until they learned how to administer a machine?

The AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop 2008 announces the 2008
Call For Participation.

Come talk to your peers about:

* Completed projects
* Work in progress
* Theories
* Best practices
* Related research
* Updates on previous talks

or anything else of note involving AFS and/or Kerberos.

The AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop is a week long conference
for the novice and the experienced. The week is filled with two
full-day classes introducing AFS and Kerberos and two and one half
days of talks by your peers and colleagues. This year's workshop will
be held May 19-23, 2008 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in