Comments for The Lone Sysadmin

Comment on Perceived Productivity by Jason Young

Jason Young — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:10:03 +0000

My co-workers seem to tolerate, and even accept that I name physical servers after baseball players.

They get slightly mystified at the fact that I name virtual machines after U.S. National Parks.

And they totally think it is over the top when I target virtual hosts and services toward the “personality” of the given physical servers, or the topography of the given national park virtual machine.

Come to think of it, the first few times I caught myself doing the latter, I thought I had completely gone nuts too.

Comment on ConfigCheck vs. Appliances by Virtualization Security Blog

Virtualization Security Blog — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:07:06 +0000

If A Virtualization Misconfiguration Or Security Vulnerability Exists Within An “ESX Appliance,” Does It Really Exist?…

Earlier this week, I read a blog entry by the Lone Sysadmin about our recently released Tripwire ConfigCheck. He noted that it found some misconfigurations in his VMware ESX server, and then goes on to ask a very interesting question:
Now my question …

Comment on Windows XP, We’ll Miss You by Bart van Kuik

Bart van Kuik — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:26:49 +0000

An excellent opportunity to migrate to Linux! (And rob them of their admin rights).

Comment on Big Red Icky Stamp by Shannon

Shannon — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:01:40 +0000

I feel a certain sense of satisfaction on this particular blog post. :) Nice.

Comment on Perceived Productivity by Matt Simmons

Matt Simmons — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:54:36 +0000

Bob Plankers, over at The Lone Sysadmin wrote a couple days ago about getting busted while reading the wiki page on X-Men. He tried to cover it up by claiming to be researching future host names. Quick thinking, Bob. Good job! ;-)

Comment on Book Smart vs. Street Smart by Eric

Eric — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:20:19 +0000

So, what is the meaning of street smart literally?

Comment on PeopleSoft & VMware by E1 Tips & Tricks » Blog Archive » EnterpriseOne & VMWare

E1 Tips & Tricks » Blog Archive » EnterpriseOne & VMWare — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:53:17 +0000

[...] Plankers, The Lone SysAdmin, found an article on Oracles support site [...]

Comment on Just Because You Deleted A File Doesn’t Mean It’s Gone by MIchael

MIchael — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:44:40 +0000

I see this all the time with Apache logs, you can truncate the file without killing the process to clear space if you need to.

> log.txt will reset the file to 0 bytes.

Comment on How is /etc/hosts bad? Let me count the ways. by G. Michael Carter

G. Michael Carter — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:00:59 +0000

Can’t argue with most of your facts… until your ISP blocks all DNS query to any server other then their own, and threatens to terminate your service because you hit certain sites too frequently. (and that was with a caching server in place)

So I use the /etc/hosts files to ensure no hits to their DNS as I can maintain these files via a central copy on my web server, which is updated like a DNS based on TTL values and such.

I know crazy solution… but when your dealing with crazy companies… you make do.

Comment on What’s a Good Workflow/Request Tool? by Brian K. Jones

Brian K. Jones — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:04:00 +0000

I’ve used RT since 2001, when it was somewhat painful. In more recent years (2005 and on) the changes in new RT versions became more dramatic. RT is much faster, even with large numbers of tickets, and the features that were always there are a little less hidden. I still think someone could rewrite RT in PHP or Python and make it a whole lot easier for others to extend, but it does the job better than anything else I’ve found.

I’ve also used Trac, and my brain just seems to refuse to wrap itself around it. I’ve seen Trac implemented in a whole lot of different ways, but it seems like it really wants to enforce its own will upon you. I just don’t find the way it handles presentation to be intuitive in the least, whether it’s for ticket tracking, milestones, tickets, or even a simple wiki. My $.02. I know thousands of others who love it, I’m just not one of them yet.

Good luck in your search.

Comment on ConfigCheck vs. Appliances by Greg

Greg — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:31:59 +0000

The advice I’ve received is to treat it as an appliance. Bugfixes are fine to patch; new versions == nuke’n'rebuild time.

If you need to make changes, automate and push them across all hosts, and add them to your automated build environment.

Comment on What’s a Good Workflow/Request Tool? by josh42042

josh42042 — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 06:18:17 +0000

Kayako - i love it

Comment on Signed, Stealed, Delivered by Susannah

Susannah — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:03:22 +0000

We got a ridiculously irate e-mail today from a guy who was VERY upset that some FERPA link on the registrar’s site was accidentally spelled “turtorial” and went to an Angelfire-esque tribute to some fifth-grader’s turtles. “This is a completely unprofessional university representation! I want to make sure that the proper actions are taken against whoever is responsible for this!”

Duly noted; thank you for your comment :P

Comment on 1001th Post by Matt Simmons

Matt Simmons — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:44:14 +0000

Hey, congratulations, Bob! I just started my blog, but I can’t imagine getting 1000 posts under my belt. You’ve worked hard, I know!

Comment on Your Sysadmin Should Know Why Backups Are Good by Michael Janke

Michael Janke — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:49:05 +0000

To drive home the point about backups, I’ve done a couple things to my sysadmins & DBA’s.

Sysadmins: Walk up and ask ‘Where do you keep your docs on the system’. ‘Cool - now delete that directory.’ …. ‘And recover it from backup.’ If they hesitate, they loose.

DBA’s: ‘How about this afternoon we do a point-in-time recovery of .’ ‘Let’s pick a time - say…..as of 05:45 this am….’

–Mike