January 25, 2010
I’m obviously playing catch up with a number of posts I’ve been meaning to do. This was something from something I read back in November by Tom Limoncelli, but was something I had planned on writing about anyway. The post, titled “Run, run, run, dead“, brings a nice analogy of things breaking in the analog/digital eras, and points out that as system administrators, we should be using the analog method of monitoring.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Sys Admin, Technology, Work 
1 Comment »
January 25, 2010
Back in November, a post on SysAdmin’s Journey had a follow-up to a Yahoo document titled Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website, specifically the fourth section. The author stumbled across an issue with AOL users not being able to see images at all.
The Yahoo document is a great source of little hints and tips, and the SAJ article is a good gotcha on one of those tips. Handy to keep around if you’re planning on tweaking your servers for a little bit of a performance boost for your users. Worth reading the document for some ideas…
Posted in General Ramblings, Technology No Comments »
January 25, 2010
“Major Hayden” has a handy tip for those running Irssi on a server in a different timezone…
/load perl
/script exec $ENV{'TZ'}='CST6CDT';
Also links back to the Irssi documentation with other handy tips.
Technorati Tags: irssi, tip
Posted in General Ramblings, Open Source, Technology 1 Comment »
January 24, 2010
PacketLife as an excellent collection of cheat sheets for networking professionals. Well worth a quick look and bookmarking for later.
Posted in Networking, Technology No Comments »
January 24, 2010
Sysadmin1138 has an interesting followup to an Ask Slashdot question about IT admin abuse… It’s a pretty complete answer, and good insight into what we system administrators have access to, and what we can do.
It’s easy to see from the response that abuse is easy for us, we have the access, the temptation is there, but we’re not all bad. I’ve known people to cross the fine line between doing their job, and looking a little deeper at somebody’s email account whilst “fixing”. It’s not hard for us to peek at chat conversations whilst we sniff out connectivity issues for servers.
Whilst we may possess the power to do so, most of us follow ethics, if not officially documented ethics, our own personal ones. And whilst there are always a few bad apples, it applies to all industries, the large majority of us are good, don’t let the few bad ones make you think we’re all out to spy on you.
Technorati Tags: Ethics
Posted in General Ramblings No Comments »
January 24, 2010
Courtesy of LOPSA, I stumbled across Matt Simmons blog. A recent post discussed us all being a large source of information, and how we all suck it in from various sources. He lists off his recent change in using mailing lists, and several other sources of information (including an extensive feed export).
Courtesy of Matt, my feed collection is huge, instead of just large, and was the reason I just flipped over to RSSOwl (see my previous post). I did some reorganization, and my new collection can be found here. I did some tidying, some reorganization, removing of duplicate and broken feeds (something RSSOwl flags clearly). He has some interesting sources, and contacts, worth checking out his sources of information.
Funnily, I realized that Matt is also using the Cleaker theme, which I decided to take a look at over 2 years ago now. Interesting how sysadmins brain’s work 
Posted in General Ramblings No Comments »
January 24, 2010
For a while, I’d been using an offline reader, then Google did some upgrades, so I swapped. I’ve been using Google Reader since late 2006, diligently serving my news to me, in its simple, and easy to use interface.
Recently I decided to tinker with a new offline reader, RSSOwl. Simple interface, easy to use, customizable searches, article flagging, and sharing features. Well worth a peek…
Read the rest of this entry »
Technorati Tags: Feed Readers, RSS, RSSOwl
Posted in General Ramblings, Google, Open Source, Technology 3 Comments »
January 13, 2010
Due to some unforeseen issues, we had to move our RAS server into a new DHCP scope, and VLAN today. This is usually relatively easy…
- Change Server IP
- Change switch port VLANs
- Change firewall to point to new server
This went smoothly, all being completed in about 2 minutes. But on checking the DHCP scope, the RAS server wasn’t requesting any IP addresses. I recycled the RAS service, but that didn’t seem to help, only hint of an issue for RAS was the generic message about DHCP server not being reachable…
Unable to contact a DHCP server. The Automatic Private IP Address 169.254.71.62 will be assigned to dial-in clients. Clients may be unable to access resources on the network.
Apparently my brain has been on overdrive, and I forgot that moving the server to a different VLAN also made the DHCP requests not reach it. This is easily resolved with a few commands on our switches…
# config t
(config)# int vlan77
(config-if)# ip helper-address 10.13.1.3
(config-if)# exit
(config)# exit
# write
A quick restart of the RAS service, and the new VLAN is hosting its assigned IP scope.
Technorati Tags: Cisco, Microsoft, RAS, VLAN
Posted in Microsoft, Technology, Work 1 Comment »
January 12, 2010
After today’s little hiccup, I noticed the random image in the top right of my page throwing an error message, something about ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE. A little digging about, I stumbled across an error in the daemon.log file…
mysqld[4478]: 100112 20:31:04 [ERROR] Got error 127 when reading table g2_ItemAttributesMap
Fortunately, most of the times, this is relatively easy to resolve.
mysql> USE mydbname;
mysql> REPAIR TABLE g2_ItemAttributesMap;
+----------------------+--------+----------+----------+
| Table | Op | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+----------------------+--------+----------+----------+
| g2_ItemAttributesMap | repair | status | OK |
+----------------------+--------+----------+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
As you can see from the Msg_text column, the command completed OK. A quick refresh of the blog page, and the error is now gone, and the random picture is back…
Technorati Tags: MySql, Repair
Posted in Linux, Open Source, Technology No Comments »
January 12, 2010
Running on from today’s outage, I’ve put a few more safety measures in place. I’ve always had old faithful Nagios watching over my servers, however sometimes a little more is needed. Introducing Monit into the picture…
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Linux, Open Source, Technology No Comments »
content rss
