Matt Simmons posted a question today on Twitter…
Anyone know how to show a user's group membership in powershell?
standaloneSA
Matt Simmons
The cool thing about PowerShell, like Perl, if it can be done one way, there are probably 10 other ways to achieve the same thing. Here are a couple… Read more…
This one has been sitting idle for a couple of weeks. Lethargy kicked in, and work was consuming too much of my brain power, but here it is, I’m working on getting it out the door. In this episode, we’ll be running through the basics of svn, and getting it working with the files we have in place, adding new files, reverting, and planning for big upgrades… Note, this is more of an SVN primer than anything. If you know how to tag, branch, revert, have a good general knowledge of SVN, this one can be skipped.
Read more…Lori MacVittie has an excellent article on passive host monitoring in an F5 Big-IP environment. Introduced in v10, BIG-IP load balancers now support something called Inband Monitoring. This basically sniffs the traffic, and responds based on the rule you define. Lori put an example up which looks for the HTTP error codes above 500, and after 3 errors seen in the responses, it marks that host as unavailable. This is a great feature as it doesn’t add any load to the web servers with active checks, and if you have ever looked at a host that i s behind a load balancer, log analysis can be a pain. The cool thing is, after the host has been disabled, the passive check can enable your regular active checks to bring the host back up when the issue is resolved. Some excellent stuff.
Matt Simmons, of Standalone Sysadmin fame, has a great post up about SNMP, giving a good all around introduction to SNMP. I highly recommend reading it if you’re getting started in networks, or even if you just want to brush up.
In my previous post about PowerShell and BITS, I stumbled on a weird quirk in the ForEach-Object function, which had me scratching my head for a bit.
Ever had to download a bunch of files from a website, and didn’t want to have to write an HTTP handler for it? This comes up on a regular basis here. We get requests from customers that have transferred from one vendor to another, and want to import all their photos to us. Here is how I solve it.
Whilst driving back from our 4th of July celebrations in San Antonio, I got alerted to a server running low on disk space. As it hadn’t hit critical, and there was still a fair bit of space left, I decided to wait until I got home. When I looked at the server, I pulled up my trusted space analyzer, TreeSize.
Read more…In part II of my walk through on configuration management, I’m going to work on setting up Subversion (SVN). SVN is a version control system and, just like any version control system, is used to keep track of changes. The most common use is in a development environment with teams of developers so that everybody can work on the code, without having to worry about other people’s work. It’s obviously not limited there, it can be used as a form of backup, keeping a track of what you’ve changed, and when. This is how we’ll be using it for our configuration management.
I’ve been asked to write a post on configuration management, and version control by a friend, Steven Klassen. Instead of a single post, I’m going to break this into several posts as some parts might be unimportant to some, and they can easily skip a whole post. I’ll be posting this over a few days, so stay tuned. If you’re not subscribed to my RSS feed, now would be a great time.
The Nubby Admin has a great post on uptimes, and the old fascination of having a large uptime1. Okay, you can get your minds out the gutter now, not that kind of up time. We’re talking servers here.
The post covers a hidden fear, and the goods and bads of large server uptimes. A good read, and one you should look at if you’re watching your server rolling over into the third year of being running. I get a mention (well more of a quote), and seem to fall in with the general crowd, large server uptimes are generally bad.
Go read, enjoy, learn something new from the great minds Wesley is surrounding himself with (myself excluded).
