Posts

Before I get started, I’d like to give a big thanks to all of the visitors who dropped by and participated in the contest last week.

UPDATE: THE STAKES ARE RAISED!

My daily work involves working with a large number of servers and one of my frustrations with Firefox is that it’s not possible to select an entire IP address with a double click with the default settings.

If you haven’t noticed already, full Xen dom0 support was added in the Linux 3.

This is a copy of a post I wrote for the Rackspace Talent blog.

Some might call me paranoid, but I get nervous when my package manager automatically removes a kernel.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the RouterBoard network devices paired with Mikrotik’s RouterOS.

If you find yourself forgetting bits and pieces about network topics, Packet Life’s cheat sheets should be a handy resource for you.

If you work for a growing company like I do, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to do your fair share of interviewing.

Anyone who says management is easy obviously hasn’t done it for very long or they’re not doing their job very well.

There are few things which will rattle systems administrators more than a compromised server.

As promised in one of my previous posts about dual-primary DRBD and OCFS2, I’ve compiled a step-by-step guide for Fedora.

FUDCon 2011 in Tempe hasn’t even fully started yet, but it’s been well worth the trip already.

After reading the title of this post, you might wonder “Why would someone pay for a Mac Mini and then not use OS X with it?

E-mailing a binary e-mail attachment from a Linux server has always been difficult for me because I never found a reliable method to get it done.

Although it’s not a glamorous subject for system administrators, backups are necessary for any production environment.

My daily work requires me to work with a lot of customer data and much of it involves IP address allocations.

This situation might not affect everyone, but it struck me today and left me scratching my head.

It’s not easy remembering which RPM packages contain certain files.

One of the most interesting topics I’ve seen so far during my RHCA training at Rackspace this week is SystemTap.

The guide to redundant cloud hosting that I wrote recently will need some adjustments as I’ve fallen hard for the performance and reliability of DRBD and OCFS2.

The pv command is one that I really enjoy using but it’s also one that I often forget about.

If you offer a web service that users query via scripts or other applications, you’ll probably find that some people will begin to abuse the service.

Diagram: OpenVPN to Rackspace Cloud Servers and Slicehost

On most systems, using Fedora’s preupgrade package is the most reliable way to update to the next Fedora release.

After a discussion amongst coworkers about professional certifications in e-mail signatures yesterday, I decided to throw the question out to Twitter to gather some feedback:

One of the most common questions that I see in my favorite IRC channel is: “How can I secure sshd on my server?

Installing Xen can be a bit of a challenge for a beginner and it’s made especially difficult by distribution vendors who aren’t eager to include it in their current releases.

Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: The following post contains only my personal opinions.

I’ve been getting requests for GlusterFS benchmarks from every direction lately and I’ve been a bit slow on getting them done.

As many of you might have noticed from my previous GlusterFS blog post and my various tweets, I’ve been working with GlusterFS in production for my personal hosting needs for just over a month.

After I wrote a recent post on best practices for iptables, I noticed that I forgot to mention comments for iptables rules.

Typical configuration for a proxy-type load balancer

My curiosity is always piqued when I find new ways to manipulate command line output in simple ways.

NOTE: This post is out of date and is relevant only for GlusterFS 2.

I’ll admit it right now: I love engaging customers and learning more about how what we do at Rackspace can help their business or ideas take flight.

It certainly shouldn’t be difficult, but I always have a tough time with OAuth.

The discussions about the paravirt_ops, or “pvops”, support in upstream kernels at Xen Summit 2010 last month really piqued my interest.

Anyone who has used iptables before has locked themselves out of a remote server at least once.

Fedora 13 has quite a few changes related to upstart, and one of the biggest ones is how terminals are configured.

I normally try to keep my work-related items separate from this blog, but I felt that I needed to break tradition for a moment.

When you need to measure network throughput and capacity, I haven’t found a simpler solution than iperf.

Sending signals to processes using kill on a Unix system is not a new topic for most systems administrators, but I’ve been asked many times about the difference between kill and kill -9.

My synergy setup at work is relatively simple.

Regardless of the type of hosting you’re using - dedicated or cloud - it’s important to take network interface security seriously.

Earlier this year, I started a series of posts to encourage systems administrators to refine their troubleshooting abilities.

If you’re running an operation on a large number of rows within a table that uses the InnoDB storage engine, you might see this error:

This problem has cropped up for me a few times, but I’ve always forgotten to make a post about it.

About a year ago, I was introduced to the joys of using irssi and screen to access irc servers.

Thanks to a recommendation from [Michael][1] and [Florian][2], I’ve been using [dsh][3] with a lot of success for quite some time.