sysadmin

I’m always interested to talk to college students about technology and business in general.

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One of the first tools I learned about after working with Red Hat was sysstat.

We’re all familiar with live booting Linux distributions.

Citrix has some helpful documentation online about configuring remote syslog support for XenServer using the XenCenter GUI.

It seems like everyone is embracing systemd these days.

During one of my regular trips to reddit, I stumbled upon an amazingly helpful Linux I/O stack diagram:

Amid all of the Docker buzz at the Red Hat Summit, Project Atomic was launched.

The openssl heartbleed bug has made the rounds today and there are two new testing builds or openssl out for Fedora 19 and 20:

I’ve written about installing Xen on Fedora 19 and earlier versions on this blog before.

I figured that the Puppy Linux and icanhazip.

Many of the non-technical posts on the blog are inspired by the comments of others.

I’ve made posts about the DevOps Weekly mailing list before.

My SANS classmates were learning how to set and recognize file permissions on a Linux server and we realized it would be helpful to display the octal value of the permissions next to the normal rwx display.

In my previous post about installing Fedora via PXE, I forgot to mention a big time saver for the installation.

This post has been a bit delayed, but I want to follow up on the post I wrote last month about moving from OS X to Linux at work.

If you run bwm-ng and you’ve run a yum upgrade lately on Fedora 19, you have probably seen this:

The thought of using Linux as a manager in a highly Windows- and Mac-centric corporate environment isn’t something to be taken lightly.

Outside of the RHCA exams, I haven’t configured a PXE system for my personal needs.

After my podcast interview at the 2013 Red Hat Summit, Dan Walsh posted a photo of himself in the SELinux shirt that I gave him at the Summit:

The confined user support in SELinux is handy for ensuring that users aren’t able to do something that they shouldn’t.

David Egts and Gunnar Hellekson were kind enough to invite me to participate in their Dave and Gunnar Show podcast during the 2013 Red Hat Summit.

Most of my websites run on a pair of Supermicro servers that I purchased from Silicon Mechanics (and I can’t say enough good things about them and their servers).

It’s been a little while since I last posted about installing Xen on Fedora, so I figured that Fedora 19’s beta release was as good a time as any to write a new post.

This post is a quick one but I wanted to share it since I taught it to someone new today.

Changing my ssh port from the default port (22) has been one of my standard processes for quite some time when I build new servers or virtual machines.

The wheel group exists for a critical purpose and Wikipedia has a concise definition:

I’m in the process of moving back to a postfix/dovecot setup for hosting my own mail and I wanted a way to remove the more sensitive email headers that are normally generated when I send mail.

I dragged out an old Aopen MP57-D tonight that was just sitting in the closet and decided to load up kvm on Fedora 18.

It’s no secret that Google Reader is a popular way to keep up with your RSS feeds, but it’s getting shelved later this year.

I had a peculiar situation today where I cloned a repository into a directory which was inside another repository.

This post covers the second half of my experience moving back to a Linux desktop but I figured it was a good opportunity to focus on the ThinkPad T430s itself as well as the Lenovo ordering experience.

Although I’ve been exclusively using a Mac for everything but servers since about 2008, I found myself considering a move back to Linux on the desktop after seeing how some people were using it at LinuxCon.

Automating package updates in CentOS 6 is a quick process and it ensures that your system receives the latest available security patches, bugfixes and enhancements.

After a recent issue I had with some users in the Puppy Linux forums, I thought it might be prudent to write a post about how to monitor and protect your reputation online.

Vitalie Cherpec contacted me back in May about his new hosted DNS offering, Luadns.

Although GRUB 2 does give us some nice benefits, changing its configuration can be a bit of a challenge if you’re used to working with the original GRUB for many, many years.

LVM snapshots can be really handy when you’re trying to take a backup of a running virtual machine.

This problem came up in conversation earlier this week and I realized that I’d never written a post about it.

If you try to run Xen without libvirt on Fedora 17 with SELinux in enforcing mode, you’ll be butting heads with SELinux in no time.

Anyone who has been a system administrator for even a short length of time has probably used traceroute at least once.

The feedback from my last lengthy post (Lessons learned in the ambulance pay dividends in the datacenter) about analogies between EMS and server administration was mostly positive, so I decided to do it again!

While cleaning up a room at home in preparation for some new flooring, I found my original documents from when I first became certified as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) in Texas.

Kristóf Kovács has a fantastic post about some lesser-known Linux tools that can really come in handy in different situations.

I originally wrote this post for the Rackspace Blog but I decided to post it here in case some of my readers might have missed it.

I originally wrote this post for the Rackspace Blog but I’ve posted it here just in case anyone following my blog’s feed finds it useful.

The grades came back last Friday and I’ve passed the last exam in the requirements to become a Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA).

Getting Fedora 16 working in XenServer isn’t the easiest thing to do, but I’ve put together a repository on GitHub that should help.

One of the handiest tools in the OpenSSL toolbox is s_client.

As promised in my earlier post entitled Kerberos for haters, I’ve assembled the simplest possible guide to get Kerberos up an running on two CentOS 5 servers.