The Lone Sysadmin

• Luke Kanies Wants to Modernize System Administration - O'Reilly News
  This is a really good interview with Luke Kanies. I agree with a lot of what he's saying. We aren't using Puppet right now, we're using all the tools he mentions as being inadequate. The next iteration of our Linux operating environments will use something like Puppet to keep everything in sync, to keep everything maintained, etc.

• Stick Figures in Peril pool > Flickr
  "kidnapped hostages may not be exchanged for briefcases full of cash here" Great pool of photos of stick figures, with captioning…
• Adventuring Party Politics
  If the presidential candidates played Forgotten Realms together. OMFG, funny. "KUCINICH: IM A BARD" LOL.

• Biker jailed for YouTube stunt video - CNN.com
  Dear fellow Internet users, if you post videos where you are doing illegal things people will find you and put you in jail, or cite you for breaking a law. End of story.

• ICANHASFORCE?
  This made me laugh. The Saw VI Ackbar's head poster put me over the top.
• Days of Autumn - The Big Picture - Boston.com
  I love the Big Picture blog. This entry has a couple of photos from Munich and the Koenigsee, where I was six weeks ago. The shot of the cattle on the barge is interesting… (also, that barge is one of the only non-electric boats on the lake).

Mark Callaghan over at High Availability MySQL made some comments about the wording in the MySQL documentation. All you readers of my blog will know why I find his comments interesting:

MySQL documentation states that replicating from a 5.0 master to a 5.1 slave should work. This is very different from stating that it does work. That section of the manual should enter the 5.1 no-use case competition.

Frankly, I hate the word “should.” To see it in vendor documentation like this is terrible, because it’s a weasel word. It puts the onus of testing and support on the end user, and gives the vendor a cop-out when it doesn’t work. “Well, we only said it should work, not that it does.” Not saying that MySQL does that, but other vendors certainly do.

For me, seeing “should” in this situation always translates to “does not” when I start thinking about the reasons for the hedging. Have they not tested it? Maybe they have tested it but it fails sometimes and they haven’t figured out quite why. Maybe they want to say it “does” work, but they just need to qualify it with more criteria they haven’t documented yet.

Regardless of the reasons, and for most people who need to rely on features like this for production systems, having “should work” in your documentation is functionally identical to not having the feature at all.

• FM 100 Hue Test
  The blog "Tech at Play" had this on it, it's interesting to see what hues are troublesome for my eyes, especially since I work with color. I scored a 7.

If there’s one feature I want to see added to VMware Virtual Infrastructure it’s the ability to update hardware firmware.

“Hi, I’m VirtualCenter. I noticed you have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with BIOS 2.3.1. I have a copy of BIOS 2.4.3, let me put that on there for you. Your fibre channel HBA has firmware from the stone age? No big deal, maintenance mode, update, reboot, awesome. BTW, I also set the queue depth on the HBA to the optimal values.”

Perhaps you can speculate what I’ve spent the last few hours doing… several hours of my life I’m never getting back. I can only imagine that VMware has thought of this already, but I wish they’d hurry up. :-)

My friend Tom found this, I thought it was worth re-sharing:

I can think of several ways of making things like /dev/random stop changing, mainly based on what my customers have done to machines.