The Lone Sysadmin

Want to add a “RAM disk” to your Red Hat Enterprise Linux host? If you mean an all-RAM filesystem then it’s super easy. Add this one line to your /etc/fstab:

none /ramdisk tmpfs defaults,size=1024m 1 2

(tabs between the fields, like everything else in fstab)

Then a “mount -a” will get it running. Obviously change size=1024m to be whatever makes sense.

Probably works great on other distributions, too, just haven’t tried it.

Seth Godin has a post about answering “why?” sorts of questions, concluding with a great line:

“The single most efficient (and lowest cost) technique for improving your operations is answering the why questions! You should embrace these people, not send them away.”

Last week I had a customer ask me why my team has a policy to do something a certain way. My response was “you know, I know why we did it in the past, but it doesn’t make any sense now.” The simple question of “why?” prompted a policy change.

I always try to answer “why” questions with a truthful answer. If I don’t know why something is the way it is I find out. I hate argument by authority answers like “because it’s our policy.” I will never leave an answer at that. Sure, sometimes my explanation of why we do things a certain way doesn’t go over well, but then the customer and I can have a productive discussion to sort it out.

As a system administrator, what do you do when someone asks you ‘why?’

Can everybody on your team answer a “why” question? If not, do they feel comfortable passing that question to someone else who can answer it?

Why not?

Homework: at your next team or group meeting let everybody ask one question of the rest of the group, about anything work-related. If you run out of time pick it up again at the next meeting. If a question cannot be answered designate someone to figure it out.

Ah, my blog. I’ve kinda been out of it the last month or so, and for that I apologize. Lots of stuff going on in my life, including meeting a wonderful girl and doing lots of stuff with her, lots of work-related things (new big projects, which is great), and also doing some theater work. I am soooo behind in reading blogs, too. You can tell when I am because the blog stops getting del.icio.us auto-posts.

I’ll be running the lights for the Strollers production of Hair at the Bartell Theatre in Madison, WI. If you’re in town, not buried under 20+ inches of snow, and want to see a good show (including a bunch of nudity) come see it. Strollers is a great theater group, with a lot of very talented, professional volunteers working as designers, electricians, directors, producers, etc. It’s a great hobby, mainly because it’s a great group of people. And it shows(no pun intended).

Running the light board means a bunch of time spent sitting waiting for the show to start. Which also means that I’ll have time to write. Yay wireless!

Are you trying to install the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager client on your 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux box?

Are you getting an error like:

error: Failed dependencies:
libstdc++.so.5()(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64
libstdc++.so.5(CXXABI_1.2)(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64
libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2)(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64
libstdc++.so.5 is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386
libstdc++.so.5(CXXABI_1.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386
libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386
libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386

Do you already have compat-libstdc++-33 installed?

Yeah, I did, too. Turns out you need the 32-bit compat-libstdc++-33 package. Get it with:

up2date compat-libstdc++-33 --arch=i386

If this is mentioned anywhere I didn’t find it.

You might end up with both 32- and 64-bit versions of that package. You can get rid of them all if you need to with:

rpm --erase --allmatches compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-47.3

“Dude, there should be a WOOT SMTP command,” my colleague Dave IMs me.

We’d been trying to diagnose why the world’s worst SMTP client doesn’t work with our SMTP server.

“Oh, totally. Like instead of HELO,” I reply.

“WOOT lonesysadmin.net”

“250 mail.server.com Hello lonesysadmin.net [127.0.0.1] Pleased to be 0\/\/n3d by j00″

“Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” - Baruch Spinoza

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  Amen. I hate, hate, hate it when I can’t move customers forward to newer releases of things like PHP because all the old stuff breaks. Major versions are where you remove things, not .X releases.